Hypermedia-driven Socio-technical Networks for Goal-driven Discovery in the Web of Things

To cope with dynamic environments, Internet of Things (IoT) applications are expected to autonomously discover and interact with services at runtime in pursuit of design or user-specified goals. On the one hand, various paradigms and technologies are available to program goal-driven autonomous software agents, and on the other hand hypermedia-driven environments are central to the development of robust machine-to-machine applications. However, existing approaches for the development of hypermedia-driven environments fall short of meeting the needs of autonomous agents: they either severely restrict the agents' autonomy, or their topological structure is either fragmented or inefficient to navigate at scale. In this paper, we explore the use of socio-technical networks, that is networks of people and things interrelated in a meaningful manner via typed relations, as an overlay for enhancing hypermedia-driven interaction in IoT environments. We present a proof of concept and discuss several classes of applications in which this model could prove useful.