ETSI TR 103 608 V1.1.1 (2019-07)

ETSI TR 103 608 V1.1.1 (2019-07)






TECHNICAL REPORT
SmartM2M;
SAREF publication framework reinforcing
the engagement of its community of users

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2 ETSI TR 103 608 V1.1.1 (2019-07)



Reference
DTR/SmartM2M-103608
Keywords
framework, IoT, SAREF, semantic
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3 ETSI TR 103 608 V1.1.1 (2019-07)
Contents
Intellectual Property Rights . 4
Foreword . 4
Modal verbs terminology . 4
1 Scope . 4
2 References . 4
2.1 Normative references . 4
2.2 Informative references . 5
3 Definition of terms, symbols and abbreviations . 6
3.1 Terms . 6
3.2 Symbols . 6
3.3 Abbreviations . 6
4 Specification of the SAREF publication framework . 7
5 Related initiatives . 7
6 Actors and use cases . 8
6.0 Introduction . 8
6.1 Development actors . 8
6.2 Steering actors . 9
6.3 Community actors . 10
7 Technical requirements . 11
7.0 Introduction . 11
7.1 Ontological requirements management . 11
7.2 Ontology implementation . 11
7.3 Ontology documentation . 12
7.4 Ontology publication . 12
7.5 Ontology Search . 12
7.6 Ontology Maintenance . 13
7.7 Project Management . 13
7.8 Community and social . 13
8 Requirements and guidelines based on best practices . 14
8.0 Introduction . 14
8.1 General requirements for the SAREF ontology and its extensions . 14
8.2 Requirements for the publication of the SAREF ontology on the portal . 15
8.2.1 Different ontology documents with different versions . 15
8.2.2 Namespace and IRIs . 15
8.2.3 Requirements for usability and referencing . 16
8.3 Guidelines for the development of the SAREF ontology . 16
8.3.0 Introduction. 16
8.3.1 Naming convention . 16
8.3.2 Metadata . 17
8.3.2.0 Introduction . 17
8.3.2.1 Ontology metadata . 17
8.3.2.2 Term metadata . 17
8.3.3 Reusing existing ontologies . 18
8.3.3.0 Introduction . 18
8.3.3.1 Direct import . 18
8.3.3.2 Reusing terms of existing ontologies . 18
8.3.3.3 Alignment. 18
History . 20


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4 ETSI TR 103 608 V1.1.1 (2019-07)
Intellectual Property Rights
Essential patents
IPRs essential or potentially essential to normative deliverables may have been declared to ETSI. The information
pertaining to these essential IPRs, if any, is publicly available for ETSI members and non-members, and can be found
in ETSI SR 000 314: "Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs); Essential, or potentially Essential, IPRs notified to ETSI in
respect of ETSI standards", which is available from the ETSI Secretariat. Latest updates are available on the ETSI Web
server (https://ipr.etsi.org/).
Pursuant to the ETSI IPR Policy, no investigation, including IPR searches, has been carried out by ETSI. No guarantee
can be given as to the existence of other IPRs not referenced in ETSI SR 000 314 (or the updates on the ETSI Web
server) which are, or may be, or may become, essential to the present document.
Trademarks
The present document may include trademarks and/or tradenames which are asserted and/or registered by their owners.
ETSI claims no ownership of these except for any which are indicated as being the property of ETSI, and conveys no
right to use or reproduce any trademark and/or tradename. Mention of those trademarks in the present document does
not constitute an endorsement by ETSI of products, services or organizations associated with those trademarks.
Foreword
This Technical Report (TR) has been produced by ETSI Technical Committee Smart Machine-to-Machine
communications (SmartM2M).
Modal verbs terminology
In the present document "should", "should not", "may", "need not", "will", "will not", "can" and "cannot" are to be
interpreted as described in clause 3.2 of the ETSI Drafting Rules (Verbal forms for the expression of provisions).
"must" and "must not" are NOT allowed in ETSI deliverables except when used in direct citation.

ETSI

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5 ETSI TR 103 608 V1.1.1 (2019-07)
1 Scope
The present document specifies the functional requirements for the publication framework of the SAREF ontology and
its extensions. The publication framework provides a uniform documentation website for SAREF and its extensions
such that (1) the documentation is designed for domain experts and software developers apart from documentation for
ontology engineers, (2) industries can interact with the content, provide useful feedback to SAREF developers and
suggest additions/modifications. Additionally, SAREF developers would get to know more about the SAREF
community of users. Requirements for the publication framework aim at enabling industries to implement solutions
with SAREF faster, and to reinforce the engagement of the community of users such that the SAREF developers can
plan new evolutions of the current and future extensions.
2 References
2.1 Normative references
Normative references are not applicable in the present document.
2.2 Informative references
References are either specific (identified by date of publication and/or edition number or version number) or
non-specific. For specific references, only the cited version applies. For non-specific references, the latest version of the
referenced document (including any amendments) applies.
NOTE: While any hyperlinks included in this clause were valid at the time of publication ETSI cannot guarantee
their long term validity.
The following referenced documents are not necessary for the application of the present document but they assist the
user with regard to a particular subject area.
[i.1] ETSI TS 103 264 (V1.1.1): "SmartM2M; Smart Appliances; Reference Ontology and oneM2M
Mapping".
[i.2] ETSI TS 103 264 (V2.1.1): "SmartM2M; Smart Appliances; Reference Ontology and oneM2M
Mapping".
[i.3] ETSI TS 103 410-1 (V1.1.1): "SmartM2M; Smart Appliances Extension to SAREF; Part 1:
Energy Domain".
[i.4] ETSI TS 103 410-2 (V1.1.1): "SmartM2M; Smart Appliances Extension to SAREF; Part 2:
Environment Domain".
[i.5] ETSI TS 103 410-3 (V1.1.1): "SmartM2M; Smart Appliances Extension to SAREF; Part 3:
Building Domain".
[i.6] ETSI TS 103 410-4 (V1.1.1): "SmartM2M Extension to SAREF Part 4: Smart Cities Domain".
[i.7] ETSI TS 103 410-5 (V1.1.1): "SmartM2M; Extension to SAREF; Part 5: Industry and
Manufacturing Domains".
[i.8] ETSI TS 103 410-6 (V1.1.1): "SmartM2M; Extension to SAREF; Part 6: Smart Agriculture and
Food Chain Domain".
[i.9] ETSI TR 103 411 (V1.1.1): "SmartM2M; Smart Appliances; SAREF extension investigation".
[i.10] Alobaid, A., Garijo, D., Poveda-Villalón, M., Santana-Perez, I., Fernández-Izquierdo, A., Corcho,
O.:"Automating ontology engineering support activities with OnToology. Journal of Web
Semantics". 2018. In press. ISSN 1570-8268.
NOTE: Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.websem.2018.09.003.
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6 ETSI TR 103 608 V1.1.1 (2019-07)
[i.11] Halilaj, L., Petersen, N., Grangel-González, I., Lange, C., Auer, S., Coskun, G., & Lohmann, S.
(2015). "VoCol: An Integrated Environment to Support Collaborative Vocabulary Development
with Version Control Systems". In 20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and
Knowledge Management (EKAW'16).
[i.12] M. Lefrançois, J. Kalaoja, T. Ghariani, A. Zimmerman: "The SEAS Knowledge Model", ITEA2
12004 Smart Energy Aware Systems Deliverable 2.2, Jan 2017.
[i.13] Tim Berners-Lee: "Cool URIs don't change", W3C Note, W3C, 1998.
[i.14] Leo Sauermann and Richard Cyganiak: "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web", W3C Note, W3C,
December 03 2008.
[i.15] W3C Design issue: "Linked data", 2005.
NOTE: Available at http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html.
[i.16] W3C OWL Working Group: "OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Structural Specification and
Functional-Style Syntax (Second Edition)", W3C Recommendation 11 December 2012. Technical
report, W3C, 2012.
[i.17] Pierre-Yves Vandenbussche and Bernard Vatant: "Metadata recommendations for linked open data
vocabularies", Web document, 2012.
[i.18] W3C OWL Working Group: "OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Document Overview (Second
Edition)", W3C Recommendation 11 December 2012. W3C, 2012.
[i.19] Martin, Philippe. 2000. Propositions of Conventions for RDF. May 28, 2000.
NOTE: Available at http://www-sop.inria.fr/acacia/personnel/phmartin/RDF/conventions.html.
[i.20] D. Beckett, T. Berners-Lee, E. Prud'hommeaux, G. Carothers: "RDF 1.1 Turtle, Terse RDF Triple
Language", W3C Recommendation 25 February 2014, W3C, 2014.
[i.21] P. Y. Vandenbussche, G. Atemezing, M. Poveda-Villalón, B. Vatant: "Linked Open Vocabularies
(LOV): a gateway to reusable semantic vocabularies on the Web". Semantic Web, 8(3), 437-452.
2017.
3 Definition of terms, symbols and abbreviations
3.1 Terms
For the purposes of the present document, the following term applies:
ontology: formal specification of a conceptualization, used to explicitly capture the semantics of a certain reality
3.2 Symbols
Void.
3.3 Abbreviations
For the purposes of the present document, the following abbreviations apply:
EUREKA European Research Coordination Agency
HTML HyperText Markup Language
IoT Internet of Things
IRI Internationalized Resource Identifier
ITEA Information Technology for European Advancement
JSON-LD Javascript Simple Object Notation for Linked Data
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OEG/UPM Ontology Engineering Group/Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
OGC Open Geospatial Consortium
OOPS OntOlogy Pitfall Scanner
OPT Option
OWL Web Ontology Language
RDF Resource Description Framework
REQ Requirement
SAREF Smart Applications REFerence ontology
SEAS Smart Energy Aware Systems
SOSA Sensor, Observation, Sample, and Actuator
SSN Semantic Sensor Networks
STF ETSI Specialist Task Force
TB Technical Body
TR Technical Report
TS Technical Specification
URL Universal Resource Locator
W3C World Wide Web Consortium
XML Extensible Markup Language
4 Specification of the SAREF publication framework
SAREF V2.1.1 [i.2] is a reference ontology for the IoT developed by ETSI SmartM2M in close interaction with the
industry. SAREF contains core concepts that are common to several IoT domains and, to be able to handle specific data
elements for a certain domain, dedicated extensions of SAREF have been created, for example SAREF4ENER [i.3],
SAREF4ENVI [i.4], SAREF4BLDG [i.5], SAREF4CITY [i.6], SAREF4INMA [i.7], SAREF4AGRI [i.8]. Each domain
can have one or more extensions, depending on the complexity of the domain. As a reference ontology, SAREF serves
as the means to connect the extensions in different domains. The earlier document ETSI TR 103 411 [i.9] specifies the
rationale and methodology used to create, publish and maintain the SAREF extensions.
The value of SAREF is strongly correlated with the size of its community of users; therefore the SAREF ontologies
should be available on the Web. As such, SAREF users and the industry actors need to be attracted to SAREF with clear
documentation and a clear indication about how to provide their input and the kind of input that they can provide.
The ETSI members that contribute to SAREF will therefore be able to get benefit from feedback coming from its open
community of industrial users, to better plan new evolution of the current and future extensions, and to reduce the costs
of developing these extensions. That being said, the development and monitoring of SAREF lies in ETSI's hands to
ensure that high quality standards are met, and users that provide feedback have to understand the implication in terms
of IPR. The publication and/or use of such feedback has to therefore be controlled by ETSI, but the possibility to
provide feedback will be open to the world.
The present document has been developed in the context of the STF 556
(https://portal.etsi.org/STF/STFs/STFHomePages/STF556.aspx), which was established with the goal to consolidate
SAREF and its community of industrial users based on the experience of the EUREKA ITEA 12004 SEAS (Smart
Energy Aware Systems) project. The present document specifies the SAREF publication framework to reinforce the
engagement of its community of users and to enable them to implement solutions with SAREF faster.
5 Related initiatives
In this clause, some of the main related initiatives in terms of modelling reference ontology patterns for the IoT, and
using these ontology patterns to develop ontologies, are reviewed:
• EUREKA ITEA 12004 SEAS: The SEAS ontology is a modular and versioned ontology with all the terms it
defines having the same namespace (https://w3id.org/seas/). It contains a core of SEAS reference ontology
patterns that can be instantiated to create the SEAS ontology itself with a homogeneous and predictable
structure for the modelling and the description of any kind of engineering-related data/information/systems.
These design patterns and some of their instances fill some of the representational gaps that were identified in
SAREF.
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8 ETSI TR 103 608 V1.1.1 (2019-07)
• OnToology: OnToology [i.10] is an on-line application developed and maintained by OEG/UPM that exploits
GitHub capabilities to ease collaborative ontology (or OWL vocabulary [i.18]) development focusing on
ontology documentation (HTML, diagrams, or JSON-LD context generation), evaluation and publication
(using permanent URLs). OnToology reuses existing software to carry out the above-mentioned activities
orchestrating the transition between activities and centralizing the resource exchange in GitHub rather than
exporting and importing files in a number of different systems. OnToology integrates existing services such as
Widoco for ontology documentation, AR2DTool for diagram generation and OOPS! for ontology evaluation.
For ontology publishing, OnToology provides support for publishing ontologies using w3id permanent IRLs
and also for generating the content negotiation files needed to deploy an ontology in local servers. It is worth
noting that OnToology does not require any installation process to be carried out by users as it is provided as
an online application that can be accessed and used with a GitHub account. OnToology is available at
http://ontoology.linkeddata.es/.
• Vocol: The VoCol system [i.11] aims at supporting collaborative vocabulary development, inspired by agile
software and content development methodologies, and using Git repositories to maintain the vocabulary-
related artefacts. VoCol provides support for project management, quality assurance, documentation and
visualization components. It also provides a complete encapsulated framework to publish ontologies and their
documentation, relying on the user to deploy them.
6 Actors and use cases
6.0 Introduction
The following list shows the different actors and the use cases that each actor could carry out through the ontology
development platform. The actors are organized into the following categories: Development actors, Steering actors and
Community actors.
6.1 Development actors
Developer: A developer is a member of the ontology development team who has high knowledge about ontology
development and rights to modify the ontology and interact in the development cycle.
The use cases of the developer are the following:
• Create ontology
• Access ontology development artefacts (ontology code, documentation, tests, etc.)
• Update ontological requirements
• Manage requirements (accept, discard, prioritize, plan, etc.)
• Update ontology (commit)
• Generate ontology documentation: HTML, diagrams, examples, requirements
• Configure ontology publication
• Evaluate ontology (requirement testing and bad practices detection)
• Visualize existing ontologies
• Search ontology terms in existing extensions
• Plan development sprints
• Report change request
• Access ontology development status (through metrics)
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9 ETSI TR 103 608 V1.1.1 (2019-07)
Reviewer: A reviewer is a member of the ontology development team who has knowledge about ontology development
and the ontology needs for a given project. This role has decision rights about what contributions can be included in the
ontology.
The use cases of the reviewer are the following:
• Access ontology development artefacts (ontology code, documentation, tests, etc.)
• Review and discuss contributions (in terms of change requests on the ontology artefacts)
• Approve contributions (and update the corresponding artefacts)
Validator: A validator is a member of the ontology development team who has domain knowledge about the ontology
needs for a given project. This role provides new requirements to the ontology and validates whether they are satisfied
or not when implemented.
The use cases of the validator are the following:
• Access ontology development artefacts (ontology code, documentation, tests, etc.)
• Insert ontological requirements
• Validate ontological requirements
Domain expert: A domain expert is an expert in the domains covered by the ontology. This role does not need to be
knowledgeable about ontology development.
The use cases of the domain expert are the following:
• Access ontology development artefacts (ontology code, documentation, tests, etc.)
• Insert ontological requirements
• Validate ontological requirements
• Review and discuss contributions
Project leader: A project leader is the person in charge of the ontology project who carries out the project management
tasks. This actor usually has experience in ontology development projects.
The use cases of the project leader are the following:
• Access ontology development artefacts (ontology code, documentation, tests, etc.)
• Set up project configuration
• Manage (accept, assign, discard, etc.) issues
• Manage requirements (accept, discard, prioritize, plan, etc.)
• Plan development sprints
• Add ontology to the SAREF community portal
• Update the SAREF community portal
• Generate release of the ontology (publish ontology)
6.2 Steering actors
Steering board member: A steering board member belongs to the group of persons in charge of steering the ontology
development, the community involvement and the underlying infrastructure.
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10 ETSI TR 103 608 V1.1.1 (2019-07)
The use cases of the steering board member are the following:
• Monitor project
• Access ontology development status (metrics)
• Approve project proposal
• Identify ontologies overlap
• Access ontology users list
6.3 Community actors
Ontology user: An ontology user is a potential end user of the ontology. This actor also includes software developers
that will make use of the ontology within their applications.
The use cases of the ontology user are the following:
• Access ontology development artefacts (ontology code, documentation, tests, etc.)
• Access user oriented documentation (tutorials, guidelines, etc.)
• Access available conformance results for the standards
• Ontology suggestion based on ontological requirements
• Search ontology terms in the ontology and its existing extensions
• Report change request
• Register as user of the ontology
• Report usage of the ontology
Contributor: A contributor is a person external to the project who is knowledgeable about the ontology domain and
proposes contributions.
The use cases of the contributor are the following:
• Access ontology development artefacts (ontology code, documentation, tests, etc.)
• Propose contribution
• Report change request
Interested party: An interested party is an individual related to the domain of the ontology who could be, among
others, industry stakeholders, researches, domain experts, etc.
The use cases of an interested party are the following:
• Access ontology development artefacts (ontology code, documentation, tests, etc.)
• Report change request
• Access ontology users list
• Access ontology project metrics (includes contributors, number of sprints, requirements, ontology metrics,
users, analytics, etc.)
• Subscription to notifications and news
Project proposer: A person interested in proposing a new ontology project.
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11 ETSI TR 103 608 V1.1.1 (2019-07)
The use cases of the project proposer are the following:
• Propose new project
7 Technical requirements
7.0 Introduction
The present clause classifies the previously-identified use cases and defines for each of the use cases the corresponding
high level requirements. This enables maintaining traceability from the requirements to the use cases they support.
7.1 Ontological requirements management
The present clause lists technical requirements for ontological requirements management in Table 1.
Table 1: Technical requirements for ontological requirements management
Use case Actors Requirements
Insert ontological requirements The system should allow the creation and storage of
• Validator
ontological requirements.
• Domain
expert
Update ontological requirements • Developer The system should allow the modification of ontological
requirements.
Validate ontological requirements • Validator The system should allow the validation of ontological
requirements.
• Domain
expert
Manage ontological requirements • Developer The system should provide support for the ontological
(accept, discard, prioritize, plan, requirements life cycle:
• Project
etc.)
• Set ontological requirements status.
lea
...