Architecting a Mashable Open World Wide Web of Things

Many efforts are currently going towards networking smart things from the physical world (e.g. RFID, wireless sensor and actuator networks, embedded devices) on a larger scale. Rather than exposing real-world data and functionality through proprietary and tightly-coupled systems we propose to make them an integral part of the Web. As a result, smart things become easier to build upon. Popular Web languages (e.g. HTML, URI, JavaScript, PHP) can be used to build applications involving smart things and users can leverage well-known Web mechanisms (e.g. browsing, searching, bookmarking, caching, linking) to interact and share things. In this paper, we begin by describing a Web of Things architecture and best-practices rooted on the RESTful principles that contributed to the popular success, scalability, and evolvability of the traditional Web. We then discuss several prototypes implemented using these principles to connect environmental sensor nodes, energy monitoring systems and RFID tagged objects to the World Wide Web. We finally show how Web-enabled things can be used in lightweight ad-hoc applications called “physical mashups”.