Thing broker: a twitter for things

Abstract

In the Web of Things, standard web technologies and protocols are used to represent and communicate with physical and virtual things. One challenge toward this vision is integrating things with different characteristics, protocols, interfaces and constraints while maintaining the simplicity and flexibility required for a variety of applications. In this paper we present the Thing Broker, a core platform for Web of Things that provides RESTFul interfaces to things using a Twitter-based set of abstractions and communication model. We present the key abstractions, a reference implementation and explain how a typical WoT application can be created using Thing Broker. We finish with a preliminary evaluation and draw some lessons from our experiences.