| dc.description.abstract | The Internet of Things (IoT) is an infrastructure that interconnects uniquely-identifiable devices using the Internet. By interconnecting everyday appliances, various monitoring and physical mashup applications can be constructed to improve human’s daily life. In general, IoT devices provide two main capabilities. The sensing capability monitors device statuses or the environmental properties of their surroundings such as air temperature and humidity. The tasking capability allows other devices or users to actuate devices via the Internet. While the sensing capability is similar to the World-Wide Sensor Web, this research focuses on the tasking capability. To remotely control an IoT device, the device can be regarded as a Web service that receives requests from clients and responds accordingly. However, currently, IoT devices created by different manufacturers follow different proprietary protocols and are locked in many closed ecosystems. This heterogeneity issue impedes the interconnection between IoT devices and damages the potential of the IoT. To address this issue, this research aims at proposing an interoperable solution that allows users to control different IoT devices using a uniform web service interface. To be specific, this research defines a data model, which is named the Tasking Capability Description, to describe the Web service protocols of IoT devices in a uniform manner. In this case, a web service can be implemented to understand device protocols automatically and help users to connect with different IoT devices. This study demonstrates the contribution of the proposed solution by interconnecting three different IoT devices for different IoT applications. In addition, the proposed solution is integrated with the OGC SensorThings API standard, which is a Web service standard defined for the IoT sensing capability. Meanwhile, this study also implements two physical mashup applications to demonstrate the contribution of the Extended SensorThings API. Consequently, the Extended SensorThings API can realize both IoT sensing and tasking capabilities in an integrated and interoperable manner. | en_US |