Distributed Semantic Reasoning Enabled by Fog Computing
Yu Hsiang Chien, Fuchun Joseph Lin · 2019
The emergence of various Internet of Things (IoT) applications has hastened the introduction of Semantics Interoperability (SI). Instead of storing enormous raw data, SI attempts to annotate these data with semantic information (a.k.a. ontology) that can enable smart management of the ever-increasing data generated by IoT. One of the main features of ontology is semantic reasoning for deriving implicit knowledge from explicit context information. Nevertheless, such semantic reasoning in the cloud can be computationally expensive with the gigantic amount of incoming data. In this research, we propose the adoption of "Fog Computing" to distribute the procedure of semantic reasoning among a hierarchy of distributed Fog nodes than in a centralized cloud. To verify the effectiveness of our methods, we compare the proposed distributed Fog architecture with a centralized Cloud system based on the use case of elderly care.