Internet of Things Experimentation: Linked-Data, Sensing-as-a-Service, Ecosystems and IoT Data Stores

The vision of integrating IoT platforms, testbeds and their associated silo applications is related with several scientific challenges, such as the need to aggregate and ensure the interoperability of data streams stemming from different IoT platforms or testbeds, as well as the need to provide tools and techniques for building applications that horizontally integrate diverse IoT Solutions. The convergence of IoT with cloud computing is a key enabler for this integration and interoperability, since it allows the aggregation of multiple IoT data streams towards the development and deployment of scalable, elastic and reliable applications that are delivered on-demand according to a pay-as-you-go model. During the last years we have witnessed several efforts towards IoT/cloud integration (e.g., [1, 2]), including open source implementations of middleware frameworks for IoT/cloud integration [3, 4] and a wide range of commercial systems (e.g., Xively (https://xively.com), ThingsWorx (www.thingsworx.com), ThingsSpeak (www.thingspeak.com), Sensor-Cloud (www.sensor-cloud.com)). While these cloud infrastructures provide the means for aggregating data streams and services from multiple IoT systems, they are not fully sufficient for alleviating the fragmentation of IoT platforms, facilities and testbeds, this is because they emphasize on the syntactic interoperability (i.e. homogenizing data sources and formats) rather on the semantic interoperability of diverse IoT platforms, provided services and data streams.