Sharing using social networks in a composable Web of Things

In the emerging ¿Web of Things¿, digitally augmented everyday objects are seamlessly integrated to the Web by reusing Web patterns such as REST. This results in an ecosystem of real-world devices that can be reused and recombined to create new ad-hoc applications. This, however, implies that devices are available to the world. In this paper, we propose a platform that enables people to share their Web-enabled devices so that others can use them. We illustrate how to rely on existing social networks and their open APIs (e.g. OpenSocial) to enable owners to leverage the social structures in place for sharing smart things with others. We finally discuss some of the challenges we identified towards a composable Web of Things.

I. Introduction and Related Work

Pervasive computing has been dealing to a large extent with the integration of digital artifacts with the physical world. The “Internet of Things” has explored the development of applications built upon various networked physical objects [1]. Items in the physical world such as sensor and actuator networks, embedded devices, appliances and everyday digitally enhanced objects (subsequently called smart things) are still mainly grouped into small islands disconnected from each other. Increasingly, consumer electronics possess Internet connectivity (as for example the Chumby or Nabaztag), however cannot be controlled and monitored without dedicated software and/or proprietary protocols. As a consequence, smart things are hard to integrate with each other and this prevents the realization of an ecosystem on top of which composite applications can be easily developed.