Page 62 - ITU Journal - ICT Discoveries - Volume 1, No. 2, December 2018 - Second special issue on Data for Good

ITU JOURNAL: ICT Discoveries, Vol. 1(2), December 2018

Moreover, today’s advanced systems and services metadata is a script type of data that describes
require intelligent decision making and task event, condition, and action-based procedures of
performance which involve bidirectional smart systems. It describes composable logic,
interactions of sensing and actuating. In order to functions, and workflows among data, devices and
empower devices to intelligently engage in smart systems so that the they can interoperably and
systems, devices and data need additional automatically engage together to intelligently
descriptions of not only their various aspects but make decisions and perform tasks. Operated
also their roles within smart systems, specifically according to procedure metadata, data, devices,
in the areas of decision making and performing and systems can be fully or partially composed to
tasks. Many approaches have targeted providing deploy interoperable, autonomic systems.
common descriptions of devices and data.
However, not many works have tackled the The remaining paper is organized as follows:
problem of how to provide a common Section 2 highlights related work, followed by a
understanding and description of logic and description of the proposed concept of procedural
workflows of aggregated devices in smart systems. metadata with a discussion on the principle,
Self-management and autonomic capabilities are feasibility, and security aspects of the concept in
considered to be the driver in the development of Section 3. In Section 4, scenario analysis and
solutions to the scalability and heterogeneity implementations for a proof of concept are
problems of IoT [1]. Merely providing the presented. Finally, a conclusion is in Section 5.
descriptions of properties, relations, and Table 1 – Conventional types of metadata
functionalities of devices and data is not enough
for intelligent smart systems and services. Metadata Description
Accordingly, common understandings of not only
data and devices but also cooperative decision Descriptive It includes basic information for finding
or understanding a resource, such as title,
logic and action workflows need to be established metadata author, subjects, keywords, publishers.
for automation and interoperability. Therefore,
this paper utilizes metadata as means to provide Administrative It includes information to help manage
the data resource. It provides infor-
the common descriptions of composable metadata mation about not only how the data can

procedures of not only individual devices but also - Technical be opened, read, used, etc. but also how it
smart systems as a whole in order to support - Preservation should be managed for future use and
interoperability and the automation of procedures. - Rights rights of the data .

It includes information on how the com-
Metadata has been defined and used to ponents of an object are organised or
complement data and other resources with Structural structured and describes the relation-
additional information. There is metadata for metadata ships of parts of resources to one another
different purposes and characteristics; these are .
described in Table 2 and Table 3 [8]. However,
these conventional types of metadata face some Markup It provides structural or semantic fea-
tures within the data content by integrat-
shortcomings as more autonomic systems are languages ing metadata and flags (tags/indexes).
desired. Recent services and applications are
expected to perform intelligent decision making Table 2 – Primary uses and example properties of metadata
and actions, which require information on know-
how or accumulated knowledge melted into data, Metadata Primary Uses Example Proper-
devices, and systems. Correspondingly, the ties
decision making and task-performing procedures - Discovery - Subject
should be described in machine- and human- Descriptive - Display - Genre
metadata
readable ways. - Interoperability - Publication data
- File type, size
- Interoperability
Accordingly, the concept of a new metadata type, - Creation
so-called procedural metadata is presented in this Technical -Digital object date/time
management
metadata
paper. The goal of procedural metadata is to - Preservation - Compression
provide the common descriptions on composable scheme
procedures of devices and systems based on
existing data models and ontologies. Procedural

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