Facilitating the Integration and Interaction of Real-World Services for the Web of Things

The "Web of Things" (WoT) is a vision of a World Wide Web that reaches into the physical world by providing a seamless integration of digitally augmented everyday objects. In this paper, we present the AutoWoT project, a toolkit that facilitates the rapid integration of smart devices into the Web. It thereby lowers the entry barrier for users to expose data and services provided by their smart things. AutoWoT offers a generic way of modeling Web resources and automatically builds web server components which expose the functionality of such digitally augmented devices. By abstracting the specific implementation of Web protocols, the toolkit enables prototype developers to focus on their use-case. In this paper we show how AutoWoT can be used to considerably facilitate the process of populating the Web of Things and illustrate the benefits with a concrete prototype application, a presence awareness tool that combines multiple Web-enabled real-world devices and services within a physical mashup.