Inter-organizational Integration of Smart Objects: White Spots in the Solution Landscape

The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) has sparked considerable efforts in research and development over the past decade. Much of these efforts were driven by applications of RFID technology for monitoring the flow of goods and prominent early adopters such as Wal-Mart and Metro Group. Also, the global standards organization GS1 provided a number of well recognized specifications that are tailored to monitor objects across organizations. Development of the IoT has certainly benefited from the strong demand for monitoring goods in business applications. However, the dominance of these application scenarios and corresponding standards comes at the risk of neglecting requirements from other domains. In this paper, we review the focus of existing works. Our contribution is twofold. (1) Using a systematic literature review, we analyze existing research contributions and identify underrepresented areas. (2) We discuss selected approaches in detail and highlight open issues in the covered functionality. The aim of our work is to raise awareness for open potentials in the IoT service domain and to direct future research and developments.