The integration of systems of autonomous agents in Web of Things (WoT) environments is a promising approach to provide and distribute intelligence in world-wide pervasive systems. A central problem then is to enable autonomous agents to discover heterogeneous resources in large-scale, dynamic WoT environments. This is true in particular if an environment relies on open-standards and evolves rapidly requiring agents to adapt their behavior to achieve their goals. To this end, we developed a search engine for the WoT that allows autonomous agents to perform approximate search queries in order to find relevant resources in their environment in (weak) real time. The search engine crawls dynamic WoT environments to discover and index device metadata described with the W3C WoT Thing Description, and exposes a SPARQL endpoint that agents can use for approximate search. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we implemented a prototype application for the maintenance of industrial robots in world-wide manufacturing systems. The prototype demonstrates that our semantic hypermedia search engine enhances the flexibility and agility of autonomous agents in the WoT.
Recent W3C recommendations for the Web of Things (WoT) and the Social Web are turning hypermedia into a homogeneous information fabric that interconnects heterogeneous resources: devices, people, information resources, abstract concepts, etc. The integration of multi-agent systems with such hypermedia environments now provides a means to distribute autonomous behavior in world-wide pervasive systems. A central problem then is to enable autonomous agents to discover heterogeneous resources in world-wide and dynamic hypermedia environments. This is a problem in particular in WoT environments that rely on open standards and evolve rapidly -thus requiring agents to adapt their behavior at run time in pursuit of their design objectives. To this end, we developed a hypermedia search engine for the WoT that allows autonomous agents to perform approximate search queries in order to retrieve relevant resources in their environment in (weak) real time. The search engine crawls dynamic WoT environments to discover and index device metadata described with the W3C WoT Thing Description, and exposes a SPARQL endpoint that agents can use for approximate search. To demonstrate the feasibility * This article is an extended version of our publication at the 9th International Conference on the Internet of Things (IoT 2019) [2] and positions our search engine for the Web of Things in the broader context of a social and ubiquitous Web, which is presented in Section 3.
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