Short paper: Enabling Lightweight Semantic Sensor Networks on Android Devices ⋆ Mathieu d’Aquin, Andriy Nikolov, Enrico Motta Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK {m.daquin, a.nikolov, e.motta}@open.ac.uk Abstract. In this short paper, we present an architecture to deploy lightweight Semantic Sensor Networks easily based on widely available Android Devices. This approach essentially relies on deploying a SPARQL endpoint on the device, and federating queries to multiple devices to build Semantic Sensor Network applications. 1 Introduction Research into semantic sensor networks has been focusing on the treatment and processing of data aggregated from large networks of sensors, often based on specialised equipments geographically distributed in large areas. [1] discusses a number of challenges related to Semantic Sensor Networks in such scenarios. The challenge we are particularly interested in relates to the ability for “rapid development of applications” that make use of Semantic Sensor Network. We especially look at applications in scenarios where it is needed to set-up networks of simple sensors quickly and easily (e.g., school projects, small experiments). In recent years, the Android platform 1 became a de-facto standard for dif- ferent types of mobile devices from several manufacturers. These devices possess several types of embedded sensors such as a camera, an accelerometer, a GPS sensor and a microphone. On the other hand, as shown by our previous work [2], the computational power of these devices already allows efficient processing of small to medium volumes of semantic data. In this short paper, we describe a lightweight architecture to create small scale sensor networks based on Android devices, and an application that makes use of such a network of Android devices/sensors. To realise this, we adapt a triple store to be deployed on an Android device, which provides a shared repository populated through sensor-aware applications on the device. The in- formation gathered in this shared repository is exposed through an externally accessible SPARQL endpoint, making it possible to build applications exploiting data collected from a network of devices, through query federation. 2 Overview The idea on which this paper is based is very simple: exposing the sensors at- tached to an Android Device through a SPARQL endpoint and using SPARQL query federation so that the information gathered through these sensors can be exploited as the product of a Semantic Sensor Network (see Figure 1). ⋆ Part of this research has been funded under the EC 7th Framework Programme, in the context of the SmartProducts project (231204). 1 http://www.android.com/ Semantic Sensor Networks 2011 78