Application Challenges of the I/W/SW-OT Paradigm

The Internet today is not what it was a decade ago. Social networking was emerging with MySpace and Facebook was an unknown term for almost everyone on the planet. Similarly the iPhone was none existing and a smart phone with the Android OS will come only after few years. Cloud Computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) were concepts known only to specific industry and researchers. Now, Facebook reports about 1.4 billion monthly active users [Facebook, Inc. 2015], owners of an iPhone count about 700 million worldwide [Ingraham 2015], and there is already about 1 exabyte of data stored in the cloud [Woods 2015]. But the interesting difference between today and a decade ago is not hidden in the numbers but in the diversity and heterogeneity of devices connected to the Internet. Specifically, there is a large number of different types of (smart) devices or objects which are interconnected among each other and with the Internet, and thus create a pervasive and ubiquitous network called the Internet of Things (IOT). As aforementioned, the IOT paradigm exploits the pervasiveness, abundance and versatility of objects which are interconnected. The objects are called smart objects/things, since they can sense, compute, communicate and integrate with the environment and with each other. These smart things are also readable, locatable, addressable and controllable via the Internet. The IOT paradigm is not defined and bound with specific environments, platforms or technologies. It rather presents an upper layer added to the current Internet structure which calls for its exploitation. A different story is with the Web of Things (WOT), which can also be seen as an under-layer of the IOT. The WOT relies on the idea of evolving the Web towards a state, where smart objects are directly