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In this paper we propose a new approach to the automated composition of distributed processes described as semantic web services. Current approaches, such as those based on OWLS and WSMO, in spite of their expressive power, are hard to use in practice. Indeed, they require comprehensive and usually large ontological descriptions of the processes, and rather complex (and often inefficient) reasoning mechanisms. In our approach, we reduce to the minimum the usage of ontological descriptions of processes, so that we can perform a limited, but efficient and useful, semantic reasoning for composing web services. The key idea is to keep separate the procedural and the ontological descriptions, and to link them through semantic annotations. We define the formal framework, and propose a technique that can exploit simple reasoning mechanisms at the ontological level, integrated with effective reasoning mechanisms devised for procedural descriptions of web services.

Recent years have seen the fast-diffusion of internetconnected devices and the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) research and application area. Research works are dealing with technologies that enable the so-called things to communicate among them and with users in order to provide data and/or accomplish tasks. This scenario is posing several challenges so that more and more researchers are dealing with them. Our work deals with the definition of both machine and human understandable descriptions of things by means of ontologies in order to enable the collaboration among physical objects and IT systems. Indeed, recent works highlighted how the IoT technology may be profitably used in several scenarios in order to accompish complex tasks where physical objects are active participants. First, we extend the Semantic Sensor Network ontology defined by the W3C Semantic Sensor Networks Incubator Group with concepts and roles that describe actuators. This leads to the definition of a comprehensive Internet of Things ontology. Then, with the support from domain experts, we analyze the earthquake emergency scenario in order to define for it a domain ontology by means of adding domain-related concepts to the IoT ontology. Furthermore, we compare our work with others that use ontologies to formally describes things.

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