Web of Things

“How do you distinguish a WoT thing from a mere IoT thing?
Try talking client-side JavaScript to it, if it just stares at you like you used some kind of an unknown language then this isn’t a WoT thing…”

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an extension to the current Internet that enables connections and communication among physical objects and devices (see the September 2013 Computing Now theme for more on IoT and its role in ubiquitous sensing). Estimates suggest that there will be 50 billion devices and people connected and leveraging the vision and technology behind IoT by 2020. A related term that's currently somewhat in vogue is Internet of Everything (IoE), which recognizes the key role of people, or citizen sensing (such as through online social media), to complement the physical sensing implied by IoT.

The term Web of Things (WoT) goes beyond the focus on the Internet as the mode of exchanging data, instead bringing in all resources and interactions involving devices, data, and people on the Web. Correspondingly, it brings into focus a wide variety of challenges and opportunities while paving a way to a variety of exciting applications for individuals to industries.

WoT: Supercharging IoT and IoE

Sensors and devices collect data with a wide variety of types (such as temperature, light, sound, and video) and that are inherently diverse (data quality and validity can vary with different devices through time; data is often location- and time-dependent, and so on). WoT resources can be ubiquitous and are often constrained in terms of power, memory, processing, access, availability, attention, and communication capabilities. The resources' heterogeneity, ubiquity, and dynamic nature, coupled with the wide range of data, make discovering, accessing, processing, integrating, and interpreting the data on the Web a challenging task.

A rich cyber component of WoT includes Web-resident data, knowledge (in Wikipedia or Linked Open Data, for example), information exchanged over social media (such as sites in which patients share health-related information), and user-submitted physical world observations and measurements. Integrating physical, cyber, and social resources enables the development of physical-cyber-social (PCS) applications and services that can incorporate situation- and context-awareness into the decision-making mechanisms, and can create smart data out of big data by harnessing volume, variety, velocity and veracity to create actionable information. Examples of such applications range from personalized health, fitness, and well-being to energy and an increasingly wide variety of business and industrial activities.

Anand Bhagwani