A lightweight linked data implementation for modeling the Web of Things

In recent years, common-use devices´ equipment has seen a leap transition in terms of shipped technology, introducing the so called “smart things” to the consumer market. To take full advantage of opportunities arising from connectivity, smart things approached the application realm bringing the novel Web of Things vision to life. In this paper, we propose an approach for modeling and implementing the Web of Things for a Smart City environment that relies on a lightweight implementation of Linked Data. We represent a smart thing as a graph of granular and individually addressable information pieces called IDN-Document. IDN-Documents are structured web resources that can be aggregated, reused and combined to build collaboration oriented services. IDN-Documents can be managed by the InterDataNet (IDN) middleware, which allows to easily publish and handling resources on the web by leveraging the Linked Data and Representational State Transfer paradigms. We also provide a tool suite for supporting developers with easy-to-use tools in designing and developing web applications according to our Web of Things implementation approach. These technologies are currently under experimentation in the real smart city of Santander, Spain, in the context of the SmartSantader European project.