1. Thing Broker: A
Twitter for Things
Ricardo A. P. Almeida, Michael Blackstock, Rodger Lea,
Roberto Calderon, Antonio F. Prado, Hélio Crestana
Guardia
3. Web of Things
Leverages the Web to support the Internet of
Things vision and connect islands of things
Relies on standard web protocols to name, access,
find and use things (HTTP and RESTful interfaces)
Can expand the notion of things: not only smart
objects with embedded computing capabilities, but
any uniquely identifiable person, place or thing,
even services
4. Challenges & Motivation
Huge variety of applications & constraints:
Resource sharing and interaction between
devices (mobile, public displays)
Aggregation and visualization of data from
users, mobile phones and situated sensors
Access to smart meter monitoring data
Real Time Communication (emergency
response)
Context aware applications
5. Research Question
What are the basic abstractions and fundamental
platform features needed to support a wide range
of WoT applications?
Key Contributions
Flexible thing/event abstractions
Twitter-like model for thing relationships
Initial implementation and early prototype
applications
6. Background
Evolution of MAGIC Broker 2
Channels as containers for events and state to represent
things
Needed flexible thing relationships and event aggregation
Related to other hubs, but not just just for sensor data
WoTKit
Xively
Open Sen.se
Thing Speak
Spacebrew – connect publishers to subscribers
Inspired by Twitter’s simplicity and power
8. Thing Broker
Relationships based on the Twitter communication
abstraction: Follow/Unfollow
Web-based object referencing – things have URLs
Web-based object access - HTTP
Publish/subscribe based communication: push and pull-
based event delivery
15. Thing Broker in action
Meeting Notifier for a Healthcare Scenario
! !
16. Thing Broker in action
Meeting Notifier for a Healthcare Scenario
! !
17. Conclusions
Thing Broker abstractions and communications
model provides a uniform interface to different Web
of Things entities
Using a single thing abstraction allows all sorts of
objects, from physical sensors to high-level services
to be modeled by an application
The following/follows relationship model provides
an abstraction for publish/subscribe style
asynchronous communication between things
18. Conclusions
Having both push and pull is useful for receiving
real time and historical events
Based on application development and experiments
to date, the Thing Broker is a simple, and flexible,
yet powerful platform for application development
19. Future Work
Further investigation about authentication and
encryption is required
Support for the mobility of things as well as the
production and consumption of continuous data
flows must be addressed
Adding thing discovery and persistent thing queries
20. Thank You =)
Source Code: https://github.com/ubc-magic/thingbroker
Documentation: https://github.com/ubc-magic/thingbroker/
wiki/Thing-Broker-API
21. References
[1] Blackstock, M., Kaviani, N., Lea, R. and Friday, A. MAGIC Broker 2: An
Open and Extensible Platform for the Internet of Things. Internet of
Things 2010 International Conference (IoT 2010), 1–8.
[2] Blackstock, M. and Lea, R. IoT Mashups with the WoTKit. 3rd
International Conference on The Internet of Things (IOT 2012), 159 –166.
[3] Gubbi, J., Buyya, R., Slaven, M. and Marimuthu, P. Internet of Things
(IoT): A vision, architectural elements, and future directions. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2013.01.010..
[4] Guinard, D. A Web of Things Application Architecture. PhD Thesis. ETH
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, 2011. http://www.webofthings.org/dom/
thesis.pdf.
[5] Open Sen.se Feel, Act, Make sense, Feel, Act, Make sense. http://
open.sen.se/
[6] Ponnekanti, S.R., Johanson, B., Kiciman, E. and Fox, A. “Portability,
Extensibility and Robustness in iROS,” IEEE PerCom, 2003, p. 11.
[7] The Internet of Things – ThingSpeak. https://thingspeak.com/.
[8] Xively - The Internet of Things is Open for Business” https://
www.xively.com
