# The Design and Deployment of an End-To-End IoT Infrastructure for the Natural Environment
## 4 Design and Deployment
### User Interface and Data Presentation
#### 4.4.2 Semantic Data Enrichment  
Whilst the dashboard application development focused on presenting the \"raw data\" collected through our IoT network in a significant way, we are also venturing further with this development by exploring how to semantically enhance our system. The MongoDB data can be used to plot the sensor readings obtained over a time period on the dashboard, thus providing a medium to the environmental scientists to carry out in-depth analyses over these sets of data. However, the data stored on MongoDB does not provide any other additional information to the scientists, other than the sensor readings, that may improve the analysis of the sensor readings. This entails information such as the types of sensors used to collect the readings, the measurement capabilities of such sensors, the related conditions under which the readings have been taken, etc. The enrichment of the sensing data collected with such metadata can be made possible through the use of semantic technologies, namely ontologies. In general terms, an ontology is defined as \"a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation\", as proposed by [PERSON] ([[http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Ontology.html](http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Ontology.html)]([http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Ontology.html](http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Ontology.html))). It is a data model that enables us to define a context or domain through a set of formal, interrelated vocabulary terms. An ontology design requires a sound knowledge of the domain to be modelled, which is normally obtained through domain experts. In this case, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the environmental scientists, who provided their domain knowledge and also narrated their experiences with dealing with scientific data. This amounted to heterogeneity arising in data formats and a lack of provenance information about the measurement readings. This semantic enrichment task aims at tackling these shortcomings in terms of providing adequate metadata information about the data  
Figure 11: Readings for one soil node. and a platform enabling the integratation of heterogeneous data through a semantic approach. The ontology created also captures the features of the IoT network, partly based on extending several existing vocabularies such as SSN/DUL ([[https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/wiki/DUL_ssn](https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/wiki/DUL_ssn)]([https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/wiki/DUL_ssn](https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/wiki/DUL_ssn))) to describe the kinds of sensors used and their measurement capabilities, the Time ontology ([[https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-time/](https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-time/)]([https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-time/](https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-time/))) to describe the timestamp of the values read, MUO ([[http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/sites/default/files/swj177_7.pdf](http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/sites/default/files/swj177_7.pdf)]([http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/sites/default/files/swj177_7.pdf](http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/sites/default/files/swj177_7.pdf))) to describe the units of the values read by the sensors, and Geo/Geosparql ([[http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/geosparql](http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/geosparql)]([http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/geosparql](http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/geosparql))) to describe the location of the deployment site. We have written a separate full paper on the semantic enrichment work, and it will shortly be published. The ontology also enables us to reason more deeply over the data model and to infer additional knowledge that pertains to the domain of interest. At a high level, we therefore hope to be able to answer complex and multidimensional queries of the following form: Can we correlate the soil moisture readings to the type of weather/or rainfall that occurred during that time period? Can we infer that the nearby river was polluted due to sheep wandering in the Hiraethlyn region when there was heavy rainfall?