Towards a web of sensors built with linked data and REST

Abstract

The technological advances in hardware and software communication technologies are speeding up the path towards the actualization of the Internet of Things. Nonetheless, novel requirements are emerging for the effective and efficient usage of the huge amount of available sensor information and functional capabilities. Several approaches have been proposed for leveraging the Web to this purpose (i.e. Web of Things). In this work, we propose an information-centric approach to enable a Web of Sensors. We combine the principles of Linked Data and Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style to represent sensors as graphs of URI-addressable information nodes, which can be easily combined and reused for developing novel applications and creating software-based sensors (Virtual Sensors). Our approach relies on the adoption of a web-oriented middleware and information model, called InterDataNet.