Service Integration - A Web of Things Perspective

The augmentation of everyday things by embedding computation and communication abilities enhances their utility beyond their traditional use and generates substantial added value for individuals as well as companies. While isolated “smart things” are already able to provide useful services to human users (e.g., Nike+, smart plant care, etc.), the real potential of this development lies in interconnecting the capabilities and services of such augmented devices and thus creating an Internet of Things (IoT). Based on this concept, the Web of Things (WoT) [3] aims at connecting devices by making them prime citizens of the World Wide Web. The main advantage of this approach is that the use of widely deployed and accepted Web standards and protocols like the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) allows for high scalability, increased interoperability, and a low barrier of entry to use the system (via one’s browser). Within the WoT, we advocate the use of Representational State Transfer (REST)-driven [1] resource-oriented architectures, meaning that every concept that needs to be used or addressed receives a URI. This has advantages with respect to the exchange of information between devices and the use of services provided by them, as all communication takes place via well-defined interfaces using basic HTTP verbs (e.g., GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) with defined semantics (cf. Figure 1). When used according to standards and together with the content negotiation feature of HTTP, this system already provides a very basic service integration scheme whose features are similar to what the Web Services stack (WS-*) offers [6].