The Social Web of Things (SWoT)- Structuring an Integrated Social Network for Human, Things and Services

Abstract

In recent years, the development of IoT (Internet of Things) technology has given people many ways to obtain information through various types of physical devices. In parallel with that trend, people rely more on context-aware service and devices in many aspects, such as health care and elderly home care. However, traditional sensors are typically locked into closed systems, which hinder the access to such sensors that can be available in other information systems. Establishing free communication between human and physical things will help build a network with hybrid intelligence and amazing services. In order to share information and enable the communication between both physical devices and human, we proposed a SWoT (Social Web of Thing) framework in this paper that establishes social networking between embedded devices, services and human. Through the supernetwork approach, we discussed the service discovery in the SWoT system with heterogeneous social relations. At last, we introduced the MagicHome prototype of SWoT.