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Role of Semantics in Smart City Applications

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Smart Connected World

Abstract

Technology is being used to provide solutions for daily life problems that are usually related to people, the environment, the economy, or society. Using technology, sustainable solutions to environmental issues have been provided to maximize quality of life. This way of thinking was the first step to develop a new version of our traditional cities—specifically, smarter ones—in which everything can give us information about its status and also provide us with a pre-defined set of reactions as a response to environmental changes. Smart cities are cities that provide smart solutions for different life issues, either for citizens or the environment itself, by collecting information based on ontologies. This type of information should be gathered considering the semantics of both the issues and the devices used to deal with them, which are in many cases sensors. Ontologies were the first unit for implementing semantics, followed by sensors with the Internet of Things (IoT) to apply the technology that helps us to communicate with almost everything. This communication is based on interoperability standardizations, networking, and semantics to explain the contexts of the received information. There are also many other applications that cities can adopt to be considered a smart city, such as healthcare, energy saving, and traffic management.

To understand the roles of semantics in smart city applications, we must start from the terms and their origins as well as efforts toward standardization. Hence, in Sect. 9.1 of this chapter we present a definition of the smart city, the factors to consider it smart, and the efforts published to issue standards for smart cities. In Sect. 9.2, we provide brief principles of the semantic applications in smart cities, in ontology, data, energy-saving, security, traffic, and healthcare. Section 9.3 describes some roles of semantics in smart cities and the relations among semantics and IoT and sustainable development. Section 9.4 discusses challenges and Sect. 9.5 illustrates the criteria to compare the ontologies of smart cities and IoT. Section 9.6 summarizes the chapter.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Sciences Department, FCIT, Sana’a University, Sana’a, Yemen

    Neama Abdulaziz Dahan & Fadl Ba-Alwi

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  1. Neama Abdulaziz Dahan
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  2. Fadl Ba-Alwi
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra, India

    Sarika Jain

  2. BRITE Professional Services, Sydney, Australia

    San Murugesan

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Dahan, N.A., Ba-Alwi, F. (2021). Role of Semantics in Smart City Applications. In: Jain, S., Murugesan, S. (eds) Smart Connected World. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76387-9_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76387-9_9

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