The four articles in this special section focus on the Internet of Things (IOT), which is about connecting devices and creating related applications to suit a business and economic need. One of its value propositions is automation. While the term IoT became popular in recent years, the basic concepts have been around for several decades. This time, however, it is commonly agreed that IoT is not only here to stay but will also grow steadily. The technology is finally ready to make IoT accessible for a very large number of market segments and use cases where the total cost of ownership had been prohibitive. Industry initiatives, including standards and open source, and academia are heavily aligned on the vision and are backing the growth of IoT by addressing remaining gaps to help massive market uptake. When it comes to connectivity networks, recent advances in Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks are making IoT accessible for battery operated devices that need to occasionally exchange small amounts of data. Equally, 5G is providing a market driven answer for use cases that need very low latency or require the exchange massive amounts of data. In parallel, semantic interoperability is now emerging as a major trend that allows data exchange between applications, an increased level of interoperability, analytics and reasoning. With ontologies engineering, the industry will soon overcome the limitations of static data models and bridge the gap between the currently deployed vertical silos.