A connective fabric for bridging Internet of Things silos

Abstract

Social and socially-enabled applications have established themselves as a large and important set of scenarios that make sense in personal as well as in enterprise settings. However, it is still not clear how to best promote an open and extensible ecosystem of social applications. This makes it hard to design and implement applications that are good SOA citizens and can participate in an open and growing set of social interactions. Our work presents an architecture and implementation based on Activity Streams, which uses and slightly extends the format to work as a foundation for a SOA that allows applications to bridge vertical silos in the Internet of Things. In this paper, we discuss the application of our architecture in several different domains and our findings from mashing up applications across silos using Activity Streams. In addition to demonstrating the feasibility of this approach, we believe that our work can serve as illustration and guidance in the ongoing effort to standardize the next version of Activity Streams.