The Internet of Things (IoT) envisions that objects may be connected to the Internet, producing and consuming data in real-time. Today, numerous middleware platforms are available to facilitate the communication with these objects. Unfortunately, the interoperability of these platforms is very limited because it requires to "manually" connect the services proposed by each platform. One key design goal for our contribution is not to build yet another middleware, but rather to augment the functionalities of existing systems via an extension to support their integration into a network of heterogeneous IoT hubs. The extension includes a RESTful API to manipulate the basic component of our extension, the IoT feeds. The IoT feeds allow the platform's owner to dynamically marshal the IoT features connected to the platform, as well as the data that they produce. Furthermore, the feeds enable the owner to manage and control the data flows before connecting them to his applications. Subsequently, these feeds may also be published to meta-hubs in order to expose them to third parties. We evaluated an implementation our extension for Android systems to show the feasibility of managing the data flows using the RESTful API on this platform.
The EveryAware platform @cite_8 provides an extendable data concept that could be use to enhance the possibilities of sharing and fusing data feeds. The platform is a centralized solution and was the only one focusing on a fine-granularity of data visibility. In our opinion, fine-grained data visibility is essential but is not yet well covered by current IoT solutions. In addition, it provides flexible and extendable data models.
@cite_8
2007722268
In the context of the Internet of Things, an increasing number of platforms like Xively or ThingSpeak are available to manage ubiquitous sensor data. Strict data formats allow interoperability and informative visualizations, supporting the development of custom user applications. Yet, these strict data formats as well as the common device-centric approach limit the flexibility of these platforms: there are no means to incorporate people and their subjective impressions about the collected data. In order to build the Internet of Things and People and ultimately the Internet of Everything, we aim at providing an extendable concept of data which allows to enrich existing data points with any kind of additional information. This enables us to gain semantic and user specific context by attaching subjective data to objective values. For this end we support data ranging from text-based formats like JSON to images and video footage. This paper provides an overview of our architecture including concept, implementation details and present applications. We distinguish our approach from several other systems and describe two sensing applications namely AirProbe and WideNoise that were implemented for our platform.