ThingTalk: A Distributed Language for a Social Internet of Things

The Internet of Things has increased the number of connected devices by an order of magnitude. This increase comes with a corresponding increase in complexity, which has led to centralized architectures that do not respect the privacy of the users and incur high development and deployment costs. We propose the Open Thing Platform as a new distributed architecture which is built around ThingTalk, a new high level declarative programming language that can express the interaction between multiple physical devices and online services. The architecture abstracts away the details of the communication without sacrificing privacy. We experiment with ThingTalk in multiple domains and we show that several applications can be written in a few lines of code and with no need for any server infrastructure.