Web-enabled processing of smart things resources for WoT applications

摘要

The Web of Things is an active research field which aims at promoting Web standards and technologies adoption for handling smart things digital representations. In this context, many studies acknowledge that REST paradigm plays a decisive role, and this has prompted the emergence of systems for Web representation and management of real-world objects. However, objects exposure is only a first step. In fact, it is very likely that a client that exploits these representations to retrieve data from objects, also needs to process them. Typically, this processing is performed by an application which, in addition, has the burden of results exposure. In a data reuse perspective, these results are valuable: will they be re-exposed? If so, will they be exposed in a way enabling easy reuse? In this paper we present a graph model for RESTful publishing of Web resources in a WoT scenario and its implementation through the InterDataNet middleware. This graph model supports the definition of scriptable vertexes for processing other resources information. In this way, the paradigm is subverted: there is no need to set up an application to process smart objects information since the processing is externalized in a vertex of the resource model. Consequently, the RESTful exposure of results is utterly borne by the middleware. We also introduce an extension of the model to support event-driven capabilities.