An Internet of Things Platform to Facilitate the Development of Context Aware Applications. Overview, Challenges and Experiments.

Abstract: There are several Internet of Things (IoT) platforms developed to integrate sensors and actuators in the Internet. To be successful, these platforms have to meet the expectations of different stakeholders, namely device manufactures, application developers and end-users. They should support distinct data formats provided from many different objects and be adaptable to the real characteristics and needs of each specific context and developer. They should also be provided with appropriate tools and mechanisms to facilitate the task of developing context aware applications, including support to easily integrate new objects and different types of data, as well as providing appropriate API to control and access objects and get contextual information in the appropriate way. This work describes a platform that provides support for application developers to integrate, manage and use information about standard and user customized objects. It allows for easy integration of IoT objects, to manage them and make information about them available to be used by context-aware applications. Things can be registered on the platform by its owner or they can register by themselves, sending the information using simple protocols, and referring the type of information they represent and also the accessibility level to their information. The platform processes the information about Things, stores it, and provides tools to manage Things and to make them available to be used by external applications. Examples of context-aware applications are described to illustrate the usefulness of the platform and its viability making the development of context aware applications easier.