A framework for inter-thing relationships for programming the social IoT

We argue that for the realization of innovative IoT scenarios, the application development environment should not be based only on the things' services but also on the relationships that may tie these services together opportunistically. In this paper, we propose an inter-thing relationships programming framework as basis for a distributed programming ecosystem. The framework broadens the thing-level relationships of the evolving social IoT paradigm and extends the limited set of relationships utilized in current technology with a set of service-level relationships. Such relationships describe how thing services can be combined to build meaningful IoT applications. We discuss prerequisite roles for thing, vendor and developer as the three main actors of the framework and finally demonstrate the features of the framework through a proof-of-concept application.