MQTT4SSN: an ontology for the MQTT message protocol

16th Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns and the 1st Workshop on Bridging Hybrid Intelligence and the Semantic Web (WOP-HAIBRIDGE 2025) co-located with the 24th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2025) ; Nara, Japan ; November 2–3, 2025

Project

Engineering für die KI-basierte Automation in virtuellen und realen Produktionsumgebungen

Publisher

RWTH Aachen

Series or journal

CEUR Workshop Proceedings

ISSN

1613-0073

Periodical volume

4093

Book title

WOP-HAIBRIDGE 2025 : joint proceedings WOP and HAIBRIDGE 2025

First page

57

Last page

70

Is supplemented by

https://openhsu.ub.hsu-hh.de/handle/10.24405/22123

Peer-reviewed

✅

Part of the university bibliography

✅

File(s)

openHSU_22121.pdf (2.58 MB)

Language

English

Keyword

MQTT

Ontology Engineering

Sensor Ontology

Semantic Sensor Network

Message Protocol

Smart Sensors

Abstract

In the Web of Things community, the SSN/SOSA ontology, a W3C recommendation, has established itself as a foundational framework for representing semantic sensor networks, modeling sensors, observations, and actuations. However, an explicit representation of message protocols is missing, which limits semantic interoperability in machine-to-machine communication scenarios. To close this gap, we propose MQTT4SSN as an extension to SSN/SOSA that semantically models the MQTT protocol. Furthermore, the ontology addresses use cases without SSN/SOSA implementations by exclusively describing the MQTT messaging protocol. MQTT4SSN represents MQTT entities such as brokers, clients, control packets, topics, and payload metadata, linking them to SSN/SOSA concepts to enable end-to-end traceability between sensing semantics and communication semantics. The ontology captures heterogeneous payload formats, encodings, and transport metadata, enabling machine-interpretable description and integration of transmitted content. MQTT4SSN represents an extensible and reusable resource that is accessible according to the FAIR principles and documented as an Ontology Specification Draft.

Ontology: https://doernern.github.io/MQTT4SSNOntology/MQTT4SSN.owl
Documentation: https://doernern.github.io/MQTT4SSNOntology/documentation/index-en.html
WebVOWL: https://doernern.github.io/MQTT4SSNOntology/documentation/webvowl/index.html
OOPS!: https://doernern.github.io/MQTT4SSNOntology/documentation/OOPSevaluation/oopsEval.html
GitHub: https://github.com/doernern/MQTT4SSNOntology
License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.16704302

Description

Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Version

Published version

Access right on openHSU

Open access