Towards opportunistic applications in a Web of Things

In spite of the increasing popularity of ubiquitous computing, progress in networked objects is still being limited by the lack of interoperable application layer standards. For the realm of the ¿Internet of Things¿ to materialize, there is a need for a common and open architecture that can be used to access and interact with several embedded devices. With the recent developments in the embedded Web, Internet of Things projects are evolving towards Web connectivity of embbeded computers populating the physical world. Our contribution is an architecture blending smart things (sensor and actuator networks, embedded devices, appliances and, everyday digitally enhanced objects) with the Web. We explore and evaluate how the REST architectural style can be applied to smart things. This way, popular Web tools and techniques (e.g. browsers, search engines, caching systems), languages (e.g, HTML, JavaScript) and interaction techniques (e.g. browsing, linking, bookmarking) can be directly applied to the real-world. We then introduce an architecture and tools to enable the creation of ¿physical mashups¿ using services from the Web of Today and tomorrow´s Web of Things.