Web of Things for Industry 4.0

Description

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the vision of being able to connect any Thing to the Internet, allowing Things to communicate together and perform tasks jointly. The implications of such a system of interconnected Things are staggering, especially for industrial applications: Things can supply a lot of data, reason about gathered data and then automatically assign themselves tasks, allowing for highly intelligent systems.
However, the IoT landscape suffers from a high level of fragmentation and lack of standards in the IoT market, limiting the interoperability of devices and solutions developed from different companies. To remedy this, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has introduced the Web of Things (WoT): a set of standards based on well-established web standards and technologies that facilitate the interoperability of IoT technologies. At its core is the Thing Description (TD), a machine- and human-readable JSON-LD document that describes how to interact with a Thing, its capabilities, the protocols it is using and additional metadata as required.

In this research project, we are taking one step further towards interoperability in industrial settings. Our goal is to enhance the TD to describe not only the interface a Thing provide on the network, but also describe the physical properties affect the functionality of the Things and capturing its behavior for industrial setups.