Integrating the Physical World with the Internet -- A Concept Evaluation

A key indicator for sustainable application development is reusability of components. Current research on application development aims to combine Services from the Web based on a description given by the developer. So, in many cases there should be no need to develop new applications from scratch. There is at least some sub-functionality provided somewhere which avoids the reinvention of the wheel. Such services may offer capabilities in terms of data-processing but also in terms of data-provisioning. In 2013 the number of smartphones in the world hit 1 bn units and is expected to hit 1.7 bn units in 2017. They are equipped with various sensors, e.g. GPS, acceleration, brightness, noise, etc. This leads to an inconceivable amount of information that in most cases is yet only locally available. The focus of this paper is on global provisioning of such data. Whereas the pervasiveness of smartphones grows massively, the Semantic Web initiatives aim to describe the knowledge of the world in a structured way. This enables machines to semantically understand the meaning of message payload and thus communicate and learn without any need for human intervention. This paper depicts and evaluates a framework to integrate the information from virtually arbitrary data sources with the Internet. This approach was developed within the SPITFIRE. project. Besides the network integration, it allows to abstract from low-level sensor values to virtual representations of physical things using proper aggregation on the semantic level.