A Multi-level Ontology to Manage Service Level Agreements in Smart Cities

Internet of Things (IoT) services, to date, have been managed through affordances made by service providers (SP) to data provider (DP) customers who supply data for hosting in a shared repository. Services provided to data consumers (DC), on the other hand, are not managed in a similar way, with DCs being able to access datasets without providing detail to track them. Typically, DCs are not paying customers, and subsequently receive a best-effort Quality of Service (QoS)—thus they are vulnerable in the current system to change in data availability. To promote continued growth of the IoT, it is anticipated that changes are required to the business model. This may result in greater levels of protection for DC customers and more guaranteeable levels of service. In this chapter we present an ontology which responds to the challenge of managing customer information and providing a service autonomously in response. An application of the ontology is contextualized using the smart city waste management domain.