Requirements and Specifications for Robots, Linked Data and all the REST

The use of autonomous robots in both industry and every day life has increased significantly in the recent years. A growing number of robots is connected to and operated from networks, including the World Wide Web. Consequently, the Robotics community is exploring and adopting REST (Representational State Transfer) architectural principles and considers the use of Linked Data technologies as fruitful next step. However, we observe a lack of concise and stable specifications of how to properly leverage the RESTful paradigm and Linked Data concepts in the Robotics domain. Introducing the notion of Linked Robotic Things, we provide a minimalistic, yet well-defined specification covering a minimal set of requirements with respect to the use of HTTP and RDF.