im4Things: An ontology-based natural language interface for controlling devices in the internet of things

The Internet of Things (IoT) offers opportunities for new applications and services that enable users to access and control their working and home environment from local and remote locations, aiming to perform daily life activities in an easy way. However, the IoT also introduces new challenges, some of which arise from the large range of devices currently available and the heterogeneous interfaces provided for their control. The control and management of this variety of devices and interfaces represent a new challenge for non-expert users, instead of making their life easier. Based on this understanding, in this work we present a natural language interface for the IoT, which takes advantage of Semantic Web technologies to allow non-expert users to control their home environment through an instant messaging application in an easy and intuitive way. We conducted several experiments with a group of end users aiming to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach to control home appliances by means of natural language instructions. The evaluation results proved that without the need for technicalities, the user was able to control the home appliances in an efficient way.