Mashing up the Internet of Things: A framework for smart environments

Abstract

Along with the advent of the Web 2.0 came a rich ecosystem of application services allowing developers to use the functionality provided by Web applications into their own customized solutions. This, together with the current developments on the Internet of Things are laying the foundations of new IP-based smart environments in which applications and services are combined to support users in ways not possible before. Recently, most of the research has focused on improving the networking capabilities of the Internet of Things infrastructure and in enabling the access to the following generation of services. However, there are two more issues that need to be attended. First, how data and functionality provided by services on these smart environments would be modeled in order to facilitate abstraction and composition, and second, how users are intended to interact with the environments in order to make applications support their particular needs. In this article, we present a framework and an user-interaction model for Internet of Things applications based on the technologies of the modern Web as a solution proposal for both issues. We start by describing the elements of the framework, and then discuss the user-interaction model by using a case-of-study scenario illustrating the capabilities of our contributions. © 2012 Avilés-López and García-Macías.