Web Of Things - Discovery

In the web of things discovery is everything.

Once you start to think about connecting every thing to the web, you also quite quickly realize that finding the thing that you are actually looking for may be hard.


No, I am not talking about search. The technology for finding documents is already in place, the technology that now needs to be made available is the function of finding things that you can interact with, quite often things of a physical nature.

For me, internet of things is often mentioned in the same sentence as smart grids. That is one novel application for internet connected devices. But, once you start to think about the web of things, and my definition here is that everything now has an API, it becomes a different game.


Discovery is about finding the things you want - fast. You want to make sure that the discovery is seamless, if you want to interact with a printer (like with Google Cloud Print) you really want the system to narrow down the choices you have.


The other aspect of this is that things will be made web (or cloud if you like) aware. By this, the edge of the network will be far more intelligent than it has been before. We will see clusters of API:s being developed for different types of things. Manufacturers will start to implement, natively, the functions behind the API for their devices.


What needs to be common is how you find them - by common I also suggest open, in that you should be able to supply your own context into any discovery request, regardless of the host of the discovery service.


Your pointers and suggestions for making open discovery a reality are highly appreciated.