Web query for things: Webpage data query service for Internet-of-Things

Abstract

This paper describes the web services designed to handle complex and compute intensive web data queries for resources constrained devices in Internet-of-Things. The compute and memory intensive task of extracting useful data from webpages are done by online cloud server hosting the service. Essential data query patterns, filtering and manipulation techniques applied to break and reduce webpage content to minimal and easy to use data format, such as Javascript Object Notation (JSON) or Comma Separated Values (CSV). Finally, an easy to use web based interface developed to assist user in sequencing and formulating the query configurations for their things. The web query service enables IoT devices to be able to extract data and respond to data fetched from almost any websites in the web. Caching mechanism implemented as well to reduce server load on frequently requested resources from multiple things.