Enabling a World-Wide Web of Things: An analysis and overview of the application semantics and standards for the IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) is being applied for stovepipe solutions, since it presents serious limitations in terms of inter-domain interoperability. IoT needs to be pushed towards a more open, interoperable and collaborative IoT. The first step has been the Internet of Things, where IPv6 has abstracted all the heterogeneous communications medium to a common network layer. The second step has been the Web of Things (WoT). WoT evolves the IoT with a common stack based on Web Services. But, even when a homogeneous access is reached through Web protocols, a common understanding is not yet acquired. For this purpose, the third required step is the Semantic Web of Things (SWoT). This work analyzes the SWoT, presenting its different levels to offer an IoT convergence. Specifically, we analyze the trends for capillary networks and for cellular networks with standards such as IPSO Alliance, ZigBee, ETSI M2M, OMA, and the oneM2M initiative. This work also analyzes the impact of the semantic-annotations/metadata in the performance of the resources.