Web of Things Semantic Functionality Distance

Abstract

The Web of Things is an architectural initiative proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium, to enable Internet of Things devices to interact through Web standards. One of the cornerstones of the architecture is a Thing Description, which is an object model that exposes devices to the Internet through a common interface composed by properties, actions and events. In this paper, we evaluate the similarity level on capabilities calculated for Web of Things objects. We developed, based on the Thing Description, a metric called Web of Things Semantic Functionality Distance (WoTSFD). The semantic functionality distance is a measure of the device ability to perform the same function in a specific application context. We evaluate this metric in a smart home environment. The results show that different devices can be detected to be similar, thus suitable to collaborate or be replaced by each other to perform a specific task in a determined use case.