Seamless Integration of RESTful Web Services with the Web of Things

The chaotic growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) generated an unprecedented fragmented landscape, each solution adopting its specific IoT interfaces, data models, protocols, and infrastructure. One of the most prominent countermeasures is the Web of Things (WoT), a joint effort to standardize architecture and interfaces for IoT environments. However, the W3C WoT initiative does not provide methods or guidelines to convert dissonant interfaces to its ecosystem. Hence, integrating third-party applications to the W3C WoT requires custom code, a significant burden for application developers. To bridge this gap, we proposed a technique that converts RESTful web services into Web Things. Consequently, we provide a uniform interface for all actors encompassed in an IoT-based system, enable seamless communication of WoT-based applications with multiple web services, and decouple the RESTful interface from its underlying protocol - i.e., HTTP. We implemented our technique through C3PO, a tool that enables the online conversion of web services to Web Things by both its RESTful API and graphic interface. We evaluate the efficiency and scalability of our solution through a series of experiments performed under realistic workloads. Further, we showcase its usefulness through a use case that depicts a seismograph-based web service utilization connected to a sensor network in a Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) scenario based on the MAC4PRO project.