Re: Capabilities & Schemas

> On May 4, 2018, at 11:04 AM, Benjamin Francis <bfrancis@mozilla.com> wrote:
> 
> There was also some discussion around the concept of "Feature of Interest", which I didn't fully understand.

This is relatively new to iotschema, but a very well known and fundamental concept that goes back to the O&M ontology, and is carried forward more recently in SSN and SOSA ontologies.

Conceptually, it is defined as:
- Features of Interest are entities in the real world that are the target of sensing 
- https <https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/wiki/SSN_Skeleton>:// <https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/wiki/SSN_Skeleton>www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/wiki/SSN_Skeleton <https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/wiki/SSN_Skeleton>
- Features of Interest have Observable Properties
- Observable Properties are observed by Sensors

And this concept is reused for actuation, where a real-world Feature of Interest entity is acted upon by an actuator.

The idea is that for a complete semantic system, we need to account for both capabilities of devices (door lock) and the Feature of Interest they are bound to (front entrance door of my house). The idea of integrating FoI into iotschema is to create relation types that enable the capabilities of a device to be semantically bound to a real-world entity. 

These data are added as metadata to the registration and discovery process.  For example, additional semantic annotation may be added to things and interactions (events, actions, properties) when a TD is registered in a Thing Directory. Then an application can include these metadata in a discovery filter to select only the relevant interactions.

As a further example, it is possible to declare that a particular light is in the garage, and it is also possible using Feature of Interest to declare that a light level control acts on the illuminance value of the garage space.

Many useful Feature of Interest definitions already exist, defined in the automotive space as GENIVI VSS and in the building controls space as Haystack. There are some definitions by UPnP for rooms in the house that are being adopted by OCF. We are working out how to link to these or create iotschema definitions for them.