© 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. This paper discusses the steps for developing a semantic description of things in the context of Internet-of-Things (IoT). This description is deemed necessary to discover things prior to confirming their participation in complex business scenarios. Existing approaches provide a restrictive view of how things should be semantically described overlooking the fact that things operate in a complex IoT ecosystem in which they have capabilities to offer and need resources to consume and peers to interact with. To address this restrictive view, Ontology Web Language for Things (OWL-T) is put forward in this paper. OWL-T revolves around 3 dimensions known as interaction, operation, and consumption. Each dimension encompasses abstract conceptual areas that are instantiated using concrete areas, which allows to produce a dedicated IoT ontology.