{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,1,21]],"date-time":"2026-01-21T19:02:08Z","timestamp":1769022128224,"version":"3.49.0"},"reference-count":50,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"3","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2020,2,1]],"date-time":"2020-02-01T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1580515200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100000780","name":"European Union","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["779852"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["779852"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100000780","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Sensors"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Although current estimates depict steady growth in Internet of Things (IoT), many works portray an as yet immature technology in terms of security. Attacks using low performance devices, the application of new technologies and data analysis to infer private data, lack of development in some aspects of security offer a wide field for improvement. The advent of Semantic Technologies for IoT offers a new set of possibilities and challenges, like data markets, aggregators, processors and search engines, which rise the need for security. New regulations, such as GDPR, also call for novel approaches on data-security, covering personal data. In this work, we present DS4IoT, a data-security ontology for IoT, which covers the representation of data-security concepts with the novel approach of doing so from the perspective of data and introducing some new concepts such as regulations, certifications and provenance, to classical concepts such as access control methods and authentication mechanisms. In the process we followed ontological methodologies, as well as semantic web best practices, resulting in an ontology to serve as a common vocabulary for data annotation that not only distinguishes itself from previous works by its bottom-up approach, but covers new, current and interesting concepts of data-security, favouring implicit over explicit knowledge representation. Finally, this work is validated by proof of concept, by mapping the DS4IoT ontology to the NGSI-LD data model, in the frame of the IoTCrawler EU project.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/s20030801","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2020,2,5]],"date-time":"2020-02-05T03:18:48Z","timestamp":1580872728000},"page":"801","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":27,"title":["Lightweight Data-Security Ontology for IoT"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"20","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6338-1603","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Pedro","family":"Gonzalez-Gil","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Dept. Ingenier\u00eda de la Informaci\u00f3n y las Comunicaciones, Facultad de Inform\u00e1tica, Universidad de Murcia, 30100 Murcia, Spain"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-8270-9942","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Juan Antonio","family":"Martinez","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Odin Solutions, Pol\u00edgono Industrial Oeste C\/ Per\u00fa, 5, 3\u2218, Oficina 12, 30820 Alcantarilla (Murcia), Spain"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-5525-1259","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Antonio F.","family":"Skarmeta","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Dept. Ingenier\u00eda de la Informaci\u00f3n y las Comunicaciones, Facultad de Inform\u00e1tica, Universidad de Murcia, 30100 Murcia, Spain"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2020,2,1]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","unstructured":"CISCO (2019). CISCO Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Trends, 2017\u20132022, CISCO. Available online: https:\/\/www.cisco.com\/c\/en\/us\/solutions\/collateral\/service-provider\/visual-networking-index-vni\/white-paper-c11-738429.pdf."},{"key":"ref_2","unstructured":"Ericsson (2019). Ericsson Mobility Report, Ericsson. Available online: https:\/\/www.ericsson.com\/49d1d9\/assets\/local\/mobility-report\/documents\/2019\/ericsson-mobility-report-june-2019.pdf."},{"key":"ref_3","unstructured":"Symantec (2019). Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), Symantec. Available online: https:\/\/www.symantec.com\/content\/dam\/symantec\/docs\/reports\/istr-24-2019-en.pdf."},{"key":"ref_4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"80","DOI":"10.1109\/MC.2017.201","article-title":"DDoS in the IoT: Mirai and other botnets","volume":"50","author":"Kolias","year":"2017","journal-title":"Computer"},{"key":"ref_5","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"8182","DOI":"10.1109\/JIOT.2019.2935189","article-title":"IoT: Internet of Threats? A Survey of Practical Security Vulnerabilities in Real IoT Devices","volume":"6","author":"Meneghello","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Internet Things J."},{"key":"ref_6","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"82721","DOI":"10.1109\/ACCESS.2019.2924045","article-title":"A Survey on IoT Security: Application Areas, Security Threats, and Solution Architectures","volume":"7","author":"Hassija","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Access"},{"key":"ref_7","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2702","DOI":"10.1109\/COMST.2019.2910750","article-title":"Demystifying IoT Security: An Exhaustive Survey on IoT Vulnerabilities and a First Empirical Look on Internet-Scale IoT Exploitations","volume":"21","author":"Neshenko","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutor."},{"key":"ref_8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Zhang, Z.K., Cho, M.C.Y., Wang, C.W., Hsu, C.W., Chen, C.K., and Shieh, S. (2014, January 17\u201319). IoT security: Ongoing challenges and research opportunities. Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE 7th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications, Matsue, Japan.","DOI":"10.1109\/SOCA.2014.58"},{"key":"ref_9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"10","DOI":"10.1016\/j.jnca.2017.04.002","article-title":"Internet of Things security: A survey","volume":"88","author":"Alaba","year":"2017","journal-title":"J. Netw. Comput. Appl."},{"key":"ref_10","unstructured":"FIWARE Foundation e.V. (2020, January 31). FIWARE Open Source Platform for the Smart Digital Future. Available online: https:\/\/www.fiware.org\/."},{"key":"ref_11","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Oh, S.R., and Kim, Y.G. (2017, January 27\u201328). Development of IoT security component for interoperability. Proceedings of the 2017 13th International Computer Engineering Conference (ICENCO), Cairo, Egypt.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICENCO.2017.8289760"},{"key":"ref_12","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"436","DOI":"10.1016\/j.clsr.2018.02.002","article-title":"Normative challenges of identification in the Internet of Things: Privacy, profiling, discrimination, and the GDPR","volume":"34","author":"Wachter","year":"2018","journal-title":"Comput. Law Secur. Rev."},{"key":"ref_13","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Gyrard, A., Serrano, M., and Atemezing, G.A. (2015, January 14\u201316). Semantic web methodologies, best practices and ontology engineering applied to Internet of Things. Proceedings of the IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT), Milan, Italy.","DOI":"10.1109\/WF-IoT.2015.7389090"},{"key":"ref_14","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Compton, M., Barnaghi, P., Bermudez, L., Garc\u00eda-Castro, R., Corcho, O., Cox, S., Graybeal, J., Hauswirth, M., Henson, C., and Herzog, A. (2012). The SSN ontology of the W3C semantic sensor network incubator group. J. Web Semant.","DOI":"10.2139\/ssrn.3198991"},{"key":"ref_15","unstructured":"Haller, A., Janowicz, K., Cox, S.J.D., Le Phuoc, D., Taylor, K., and Lefrancois, M. (2020, January 31). Semantic Sensor Network Ontology. Available online: https:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/vocab-ssn."},{"key":"ref_16","unstructured":"Cim, E., and Management, C.I. (2020, January 31). NGSI-LD Information Model. Available online: https:\/\/www.etsi.org\/deliver\/etsi_gs\/CIM\/001_099\/009\/01.01.01_60\/gs_CIM009v010101p.pdf."},{"key":"ref_17","unstructured":"Sporny, M., Kellogg, G., and Lanthaler, M. (2013). Json-Ld 1.0. A JSON Based Serialization for Linked Data, World Wide Web Consortium."},{"key":"ref_18","unstructured":"Noy, N.F., and McGuinness, D.L. (2001). Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology, Standford University. Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory Technical Report KSL-01-05 and Stanford Medical Informatics Technical Report SMI-2001-0880."},{"key":"ref_19","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Sarraipa, J., Silva, J.P., Jardim-Gon\u00e7alves, R., and Monteiro, A.A. (2008, January 6\u20138). MENTOR\u2014A methodology for enterprise reference ontology development. Proceedings of the 2008 4th International IEEE Conference Intelligent Systems, Varna, Bulgaria.","DOI":"10.1109\/IS.2008.4670436"},{"key":"ref_20","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Su\u00e1rez-Figueroa, M.C., G\u00f3mez-P\u00e9rez, A., and Fern\u00e1ndez-L\u00f3pez, M. (2012). The neon methodology for ontology engineering. Ontology Engineering in a Networked World, Springer.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-642-24794-1"},{"key":"ref_21","unstructured":"Denker, G. (2003, January 20\u201323). Security Annotation for DAML web services. Proceedings of the 2nd International Semantic Web Conference, Sundial Resort, Sanibel Island, FL, USA."},{"key":"ref_22","unstructured":"Denker, G., Kagal, L., and Finin, T. (2020, January 31). Security in the Semantic Web Using OWL. Information Security Technical Report. Available online: https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.1016\/j.istr.2004.11.002."},{"key":"ref_23","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1483","DOI":"10.1007\/11575801_34","article-title":"Security Ontology for annotating resources","volume":"3761","author":"Kim","year":"2005","journal-title":"Lect. Notes Comput. Sci."},{"key":"ref_24","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Fenz, S., and Ekelhart, A. (2009, January 10\u201312). Formalizing information security knowledge. Proceedings of the 4th international Symposium on information, Computer, and Communications Security (ASIACCS 2009), Sydney, Australia.","DOI":"10.1145\/1533057.1533084"},{"key":"ref_25","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Herzog, A., Shahmehri, N., and Duma, C. (2007). An Ontology of Information Security. Int. J. Inf. Secur. Privacy.","DOI":"10.4018\/jisp.2007100101"},{"key":"ref_26","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Gyrard, A., Bonnet, C., and Boudaoud, K. (2014, January 1\u20133). An Ontology-Based Approach for Helping to Secure the ETSI Machine-to-Machine Architecture. Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings), and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom), Taipei, Taiwan.","DOI":"10.1109\/iThings.2014.25"},{"key":"ref_27","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Mozzaquatro, B.A., Jardim-Goncalves, R., and Agostinho, C. (2015, January 12\u201313). Towards a reference ontology for security in the Internet of Things. Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE International Workshop on Measurements & Networking (M&N), Coimbra, Portugal.","DOI":"10.1109\/IWMN.2015.7322984"},{"key":"ref_28","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"75","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-319-77028-4_12","article-title":"Towards an Ontology of Security Assessment: A Core Model Proposal","volume":"738","author":"Jino","year":"2018","journal-title":"Adv. Intell. Syst. Comput."},{"key":"ref_29","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Tao, M., Zuo, J., Liu, Z., Castiglione, A., and Palmieri, F. (2018). Multi-layer cloud architectural model and ontology-based security service framework for IoT-based smart homes. Future Gener. Comput. Syst.","DOI":"10.1016\/j.future.2016.11.011"},{"key":"ref_30","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"110510","DOI":"10.1109\/ACCESS.2019.2933859","article-title":"Ontology-Based Security Context Reasoning for Power IoT-Cloud Security Service","volume":"7","author":"Choi","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Access"},{"key":"ref_31","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Gonzalez-Gil, P., Skarmeta, A.F., and Martinez, J.A. (2019, January 17\u201321). Towards an ontology for iot context-based security evaluation. Proceedings of the Global IoT Summit (GIoTS), Aarhus, Denmark.","DOI":"10.1109\/GIOTS.2019.8766400"},{"key":"ref_32","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Arruda, M.F., and Bulc\u00e3o-Neto, R.F. (2019, January 8\u201312). Toward a lightweight ontology for privacy protection in IoT. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Limassol, Cyprus.","DOI":"10.1145\/3297280.3297367"},{"key":"ref_33","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Priebe, T., Dobmeier, W., and Kamprath, N. (2006, January 20\u201322). Supporting attribute-based access control with ontologies. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2006), Viena, Austria.","DOI":"10.1109\/ARES.2006.127"},{"key":"ref_34","unstructured":"Finin, T., Joshi, A., Kagal, L., Niu, J., Sandhu, R., Winsborough, W., and Thuraisingham, B. (2008, January 11\u201313). ROWLBAC\u2014Representing role based access control in OWL. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies, Estes Park, CO, USA."},{"key":"ref_35","unstructured":"Costabello, L. (2013). Docteur en Sciences Context-Aware Access Control and Presentation of Linked Data. [Ph.D. Thesis, Universit\u00e9 de Nice-Sophia Antipolis]."},{"key":"ref_36","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Daud, M.I., S\u00e1nchez, D., and Viejo, A. (2015). Ontology-based delegation of access control: An enhancement to the XACML delegation profile. Lect. Notes Comput. Sci., 9264.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-319-22906-5_2"},{"key":"ref_37","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Baldini, G., Skarmeta, A., Fourneret, E., Neisse, R., Legeard, B., and Le Gall, F. (2016, January 12\u201314). Security certification and labelling in Internet of Things. Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE 3rd World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT), Reston, VA, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/WF-IoT.2016.7845514"},{"key":"ref_38","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Yuan, E., and Tong, J. (2005, January 11\u201315). Attributed Based Access Control (ABAC) for web services. Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Web Services, Orlando, FL, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICWS.2005.25"},{"key":"ref_39","unstructured":"Ferraiolo, D., Cugini, J., and Kuhn, D.R. (1995, January 11\u201315). Role-based access control (RBAC): Features and motivations. Proceedings of the 11th Annual Computer Security Application Conference, New Orleans, LA, USA."},{"key":"ref_40","unstructured":"Hern\u00e1ndez-Ramos, J.L., Jara, A.J., Mar\u00edn, L., and Skarmeta, A.F. (2013). Distributed Capability-based Access Control for the Internet of Things. J. Internet Serv. Inf. Secur."},{"key":"ref_41","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Bethencourt, J., Sahai, A., and Waters, B. (2007, January 20\u201323). Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Berkeley, CA, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/SP.2007.11"},{"key":"ref_42","unstructured":"W3C (2020, January 31). Verifiable Credentials Data Model. Available online: https:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/vc-data-model."},{"key":"ref_43","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Garg, S., Kaur, K., Kaddoum, G., Rodrigues, J.J.P.C., and Guizani, M. (2019). Secure and Lightweight Authentication Scheme for Smart Metering Infrastructure in Smart Grid. IEEE Trans. Ind. Inf.","DOI":"10.1109\/GLOBECOM38437.2019.9013270"},{"key":"ref_44","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Alkhalil, A., and Ramadan, R.A. (2017). IoT Data Provenance Implementation Challenges. Procedia Comput. Sci.","DOI":"10.1016\/j.procs.2017.05.436"},{"key":"ref_45","unstructured":"Baracaldo, N., Bathen, L.A.D., Ozugha, R.O., Engel, R., Tata, S., and Ludwig, H. (2016, January 10\u201313). Securing data provenance in internet of things (IoT) systems. Proceedings of the International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, Banff, AB, Canada."},{"key":"ref_46","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Liang, X., Shetty, S., Tosh, D., Kamhoua, C., Kwiat, K., and Njilla, L. (2017, January 14\u201317). ProvChain: A Blockchain-Based Data Provenance Architecture in Cloud Environment with Enhanced Privacy and Availability. Proceedings of the 2017 17th IEEE\/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGRID), Madrid, Spain.","DOI":"10.1109\/CCGRID.2017.8"},{"key":"ref_47","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"4","DOI":"10.1145\/2757001.2757003","article-title":"The prot\u00e9g\u00e9 project","volume":"1","author":"Musen","year":"2015","journal-title":"AI Matters"},{"key":"ref_48","first-page":"2011","article-title":"Metadata recommendations for linked open data vocabularies","volume":"1","author":"Vandenbussche","year":"2011","journal-title":"Version"},{"key":"ref_49","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Gyrard, A., Atemezing, G., Bonnet, C., Boudaoud, K., and Serrano, M. (2016, January 22\u201324). Reusing and unifying background knowledge for internet of things with LOV4IoT. Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE 4th International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud (FiCloud ), Vienna, Austria.","DOI":"10.1109\/FiCloud.2016.45"},{"key":"ref_50","unstructured":"IoTCrawler (2020, January 31). IoT Crawler\u2014A Search Engine for Internet of Things Devices. Available online: https:\/\/iotcrawler.eu\/."}],"container-title":["Sensors"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1424-8220\/20\/3\/801\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,11]],"date-time":"2025-10-11T08:53:44Z","timestamp":1760172824000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1424-8220\/20\/3\/801"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2020,2,1]]},"references-count":50,"journal-issue":{"issue":"3","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2020,2]]}},"alternative-id":["s20030801"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/s20030801","relation":{},"ISSN":["1424-8220"],"issn-type":[{"value":"1424-8220","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2020,2,1]]}}}