An open and lightweight Internet of Things platform to facilitate the development of context-aware applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) has encouraged the development of innovative applications and services that make use of the enormous amount and diversity of data provided by such things to provide novel and useful services. However, to be successful, these platforms have to meet the expectations of different stakeholders, namely application developers and end-users. In this work we analyze some previous works with similar goals and we discuss some issues that need to be addressed when developing an IoT platform. Based on this knowledge, we proposed and developed an open and lightweight IoT platform that allows application developers and end-users to integrate IoT objects, to create new sensor data models monitoring and managing objects and that allows developers to access and use, in their applications, high level APIs to handle the information related to the IoT objects. In this approach there is particular focus on two characteristics: simplicity and flexibility. Simplicity, allowing application developers to easily integrate their own objects using their own semantics, and allowing end-users to visualize and manage their objects through the web portal. Flexibility, due its open nature that supports the integration of new types of objects and data formats, it allows developers to customize their own devices and models. The first experimental results indicate that this is a viable approach to manage Things on the Internet and to simplify the development of context-aware applications. Key-Words: ambient intelligence, context-awareness, internet of things, open platform, smart spaces, ubiquitous computing, web of things.