Semantic Web of Musical Things: Achieving interoperability in the Internet of Musical Things

Abstract

The Internet of Musical Things (IoMusT) refers to the extension of the Internet of Things paradigm to the musical domain. Interoperability represents a central issue within this domain, where heterogeneous Musical Things serving radically different purposes are envisioned to communicate between each other. Automatic discovery of resources is also a desirable feature in IoMusT ecosystems. However, the existing musical protocols are not adequate to support discoverability and interoperability across the wide heterogeneity of Musical Things, as they are typically not flexible, lack high resolution, are not equipped with inference mechanisms that could exploit on board the information on the whole application environment. Besides, they hardly ever support easy integration with the Web. In addition, IoMusT applications are often characterized by strict requirements in terms of latency of the exchanged messages. Semantic Web of Things technologies have the potential to overcome the limitations of existing musical protocols by enabling discoverability and interoperability across heterogeneous Musical Things. In this paper we propose the Musical Semantic Event Processing Architecture (MUSEPA), a semantically-based architecture designed to meet the IoMusT requirements of low-latency communication, discoverability, interoperability, and automatic inference. The architecture is based on the CoAP protocol, a semantic publish/subscribe broker, and the adoption of shared ontologies for describing Musical Things and their interactions. The code implementing MUSEPA can be accessed at: https://github.com/CIMIL/MUSEPA/.