As the ideas and technologies behind the Internet of Things (IoT) take root, a vast array of new possibilities and applications is emerging with the significantly increased number of devices connected to the Internet. Moreover, we are also witnessing the fast emergence of location-based services with an abundant number of localization technologies and solutions with varying capabilities and limitations. We believe that, at this moment in time, the successful integration of these two diverse technologies is mutually beneficial and even essential for both fields. IoT is one of the major fields that can benefit from localization services, and so, the integration of localization systems in the IoT ecosystem would enable numerous new IoT applications. Further, the use of standardized IoT architectures, interaction and information models will permit multiple localization systems to communicate and interoperate with each other in order to obtain better context information and resolve positioning errors or conflicts. Therefore, in this work, we investigate the semantic interoperation and integration of positioning systems in order to obtain the full potential of the localization ecosystem in the context of IoT. Additionally, we also validate the proposed design by means of an industrial case study, which targets fully-automated warehouses utilizing location-aware and interconnected IoT products and systems.
Keywords: Internet Protocol for Smart Objects (IPSO); Internet of Things (IoT); Lightweight M2M (LwM2M); localization; machine to machine (M2M); positioning; semantic interoperability.