A Web of Things Application Architecture – Integrating the Real-World into the Web

Published:  August 15, 2011
ETH Zurich, Zurich

Authors: Dominique Guinard -  -  -  -

Abstract
A central concern in the area of pervasive computing has been the integration of digital artifacts with the physical world and vice-versa. Recent developments in the field of embedded devices have led to smart things increasingly populating our daily life. We define smart things as digitally enhanced physical objects and devices that have communication capabilities. Application domains are for instance wireless sensor and actuator networks in cities making them more context-aware and thus smarter. New appliances such as smart TVs, alarm clocks, fridges or digital-picture frames make our living-rooms and houses more energy efficient and our lives easier. Industries benefit from increasingly more intelligent machines and robots. Usual objects tagged with radio-tags or barcodes become linked to virtual information sources and offer new business opportunities.

As a consequence, Internet of Things research is exploring ways to connect smart things together and build upon these networks. To facilitate these connections, research and industry have come up over the last few years with a number of low-power network protocols. However, while getting increasingly more connected, embedded devices still form multiple, small, incompatible islands at the application layer: developing applications using them is a challenging task that requires expert knowledge of each platform. As a consequence, smart things remain hard to integrate into composite applications. To remedy this fact, several service platforms proposing an integration architecture appeared in recent years. While some of them are successfully implemented on some appliances and machines, they are, for the most part, not compatible with one another. Furthermore, their complexity and lack of well-known tools let them only reach a relatively small community of expert developers and hence their usage in applications has been rather limited.