A RESTful Architecture for Integrating Decomposable Delayed Services within the Web of Things

The Web of Things research activities consist essentially in developing concepts, tools and systems for creating and operating global networks of devices associated with embedded resources - RFID tags, sensors, actuators and even complex computing facilities, which are accessed by services. In that context, one of the most accepted standardization technique in order to seamlessly integrate this potentially huge set of heterogeneous services consists in RESTifying them. This operation is rather straightforward for "quickly computed" services such as Flickr photo service, Google Maps or Twitter. But what about cleanly integrating delayed, possibly decomposable services, such as a parcel delivery service computing first the partitions of parcels to various tours and then, for each tour, the optimal routing respecting additional constraints? We claim that this question represents an important challenge if one desires to enrich the potentialities of the web of things. In order to best contribute to its solution, this paper first tackles the problematic of RESTifying decomposable delayed services in a generic way. Secondly, it proposes a general architecture and validates it with a case study including a prototypical implementation.