Catalog and Entity Management Service for Internet of Things-Based Smart Environments

Umair ul Hassan, Adegboyega Ojo, Edward Curry

Abstract: A fundamental requirement for intelligent decision-making within a smart environment is the availability of information about entities and their schemas across multiple data sources and intelligent systems. This chapter first discusses how this requirement is addressed with the help of catalogs in dataspaces; it then details how entity data can be more effectively managed within a dataspace (and for its users) with the use of an entity management service. Dataspaces provide a data co-existence approach to overcome problems in current data integration systems in a pay-as-you-go manner. The idea is to bootstrap the integration with automated integration, followed by incremental improvement of entity consolidation and related data quality. The catalog and entity management services are core services needed to support the incremental data management approach of dataspaces. We provide an analysis of existing data catalogs that can provide different forms of search, query, and browse functionality over datasets and their descriptions. In order to cover the entity requirements, the catalog service is complemented with an entity management service that is concerned with the management of information about entities.