Open and Interoperable Socio-technical Networks

Developing applications across the physical-digital space requires the homogeneous interconnection of people, physical devices, services and various data sources as first-class entities of complex socio-technical systems. In this paper, we describe socio-technical networks (STNs) as the building blocks of a semantic, open and distributed Social Web of Things. We address the problem of enabling autonomous non-human agents as participants in an open set of STNs. Our approach is to provide agents with machine-readable descriptions of STNs, of operations required for participating in such systems, and of supported implementations for those operations. Towards this aim, we present the STN ontology and we illustrate its applicability. Even though the STN ontology is a work in progress, using the core concepts and properties described in this paper we are able to create concrete specifications of STN platforms. We discuss the positioning of this ontology with respect to several well-known and related vocabularies.