Hypermedia-driven Socio-technical Networks for Goal-driven Discovery in the Web of Things
Andrei Ciortea, Antoine Zimmermann, Olivier Boissier, Adina Magda Florea · 2016
To cope with dynamic environments, Internet of Things (IoT) applications are expected to autonomously discover and interact with services at runtime in pursuit of design or user-specified goals. On the one hand, various paradigms and technologies are available to program goal-driven autonomous software agents, and on the other hand hypermedia-driven environments are central to the development of robust machine-to-machine applications. However, existing approaches for the development of hypermedia-driven environments fall short of meeting the needs of autonomous agents: they either severely restrict the agents' autonomy, or their topological structure is either fragmented or inefficient to navigate at scale. In this paper, we explore the use of socio-technical networks, that is networks of people and things interrelated in a meaningful manner via typed relations, as an overlay for enhancing hypermedia-driven interaction in IoT environments. We present a proof of concept and discuss several classes of applications in which this model could prove useful.