The W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator group (the SSN-XG) produced an OWL 2 ontology to describe sensors and observations - the SSN ontology, available at http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ssnx/ssn. The SSN ontology can describe sensors in terms of capabilities, measurement processes, observations and deployments. This article describes the SSN ontology. It further gives an example and describes the use of the ontology in recent research projects

Ontologies have proven to be an essential element in many applications. They are used in agent systems, knowledge management systems, and e-commerce platforms. They can also generate natural language, integrate intelligent information, provide semantic-based access to the Internet, and extract information from texts in addition to being used in many other applications to explicitly declare the knowledge embedded in them. However, not only are ontologies useful for applications in which knowledge plays a key role, but they can also trigger a major change in current Web contents. This change is leading to the third generation of the Web-known as the Semantic Web-which has been defined as the conceptual structuring of the Web in an explicit machine-readable way. New ontology-based applications and knowledge architectures are developing for this new Web. A common claim for all of these approaches is the need for languages to represent the semantic information that this Web requires-solving heterogeneous data exchange in this heterogeneous environment. Our goal is to help developers find the most suitable language for their representation needs.