WoT Store: a Thing and Application Management Ecosystem for the W3C Web of Things

TL;DR

The paper introduces WoT Store, a comprehensive platform for managing W3C Web of Things, facilitating discovery, control, and automation of IoT devices to promote interoperability and ease of deployment.

Contribution

It presents the design, architecture, and prototype of WoT Store, a tool that simplifies WoT application deployment and device management through semantic descriptions and unified dashboards.

Findings

Successful demonstration on industry 4.0 use-case

Effective management of Things via semantic descriptions

Enhanced automation and integration capabilities

Abstract

In the next few years, the W3C Web of Things (WoT) platform will represent a reference solution toward the deployment of fully interoperable systems, hence unlocking the potential of the IoT paradigm on several use-cases characterized by the current fragmentation of devices and technologies. At the same time, the worlwide adoption of the W3C WoT architecture depends on many factors, including also the availability of support tools that might facilitate the deployment of novel WoT applications or the integration with traditional IoT systems. To this purpose, the paper presents the WoT Store, a complete software platform enabling the discovery and management of W3C Things, the monitoring of its properties and events, and the invoking of actions, all within the same dashboard. In addition, the platform leverages on the semantic description of each Thing with the goal of easing and automatizing the installation and execution of WoT applications, e.g. defining the behaviour of a Thing or implementing mash-up operations from multiple Things. We sketch the main features, the architecture and the prototypal implementation of the WoT Store. Moreover, we discuss the WoT Store capabilities on three IoT use-cases, i.e. industry 4.0, smart agriculture and home automation.