A Survey on the Web of Things

Abstract

The Web of Things (WoT) paradigm was proposed first in the late 2000s, with the idea of leveraging Web standards to interconnect all types of embedded devices. More than ten years later, the fragmentation of the IoT landscape has dramatically increased as a consequence of the exponential growth of connected devices, making interoperability one of the key issues for most IoT deployments. Contextually, many studies have demonstrated the applicability of Web technologies on IoT scenarios, while the joint efforts from the academia and the industry have led to the proposals of standard specifications for developing WoT systems. Through a systematic review of the literature, we provide a detailed illustration of the WoT paradigm for both researchers and newcomers, by reconstructing the temporal evolution of key concepts and the historical trends, providing an in-depth taxonomy of software architectures and enabling technologies of WoT deployments and, finally, discussing the maturity of WoT vertical markets. Moreover, we identify some future research directions that may open the way to further innovation on WoT systems.

Next Generation Edge-Cloud Continuum Architecture for Structural Health Monitoring

“…The Interoperability layer allows the MODRON platform to abstract as much as possible from the characteristics of the sensing units. The interoperability support takes advantage of the web of things (WoT) standard proposed by the W3C [33]. As per definition, "The goal of the WoT is to preserve and complement existing IoT standards and solutions" by providing strategies to describe what already exists rather than prescribing new mechanisms.…”

An IoT Toolchain Architecture for Planning, Running and Managing a Complete Condition Monitoring Scenario

“…In order to tackle the fragmentation in the IoT landscape, the W3C consortium recently released a set of standards for the Web of Things (WoT) whose goal is to provide welldefined interfaces and guidelines for the deployment of IoT scenarios, enabling the interoperability among different systems thanks to the consolidated web technologies [9]. More in detail, each IoT system component is accurately defined through a Thing Description (TD), 6 a JSON-LD document semantically enriched that describes the affordances of the component.…”

“…The Web of Things Arrowhead Enabler (WAE) [26] is pivotal for the proposed toolchain, and it is an official part of the Eclipse Arrowhead framework 9 -due to Arrowhead repository naming conventions, WAE is referred as application-skeleton-wot. Its role is to bridge the Eclipse Arrowhead Framework with the WoT.…”

“…The second operation implies the WAE monitoring the Arrowhead Service Registry for new web services. Once one is identified, WAE translates its REST API (the translation 9 https://github.com/arrowhead-f/application-skeleton-wot technique is described in [27]) to a Thing Description and deploys a WT that acts as a proxy of the actual service.…”

“…We firstly provided sensors with a degree of interoperability by leveraging the W3C Web of Things (WoT) standard [8]. The W3C WoT is a recent standardization effort that abstracts simple sensors and actuators into Web resources that bear a detailed description of their capabilities, their interaction affordances, and their semantics [9]. In our case, each of the SHM sensors is equipped with a WoT counterpart that governs all the incoming and outgoing communication.…”