The BIG IoT API: Semantically Enabling IoT Interoperability

The Internet of Things as the aggregate of all Internet- or Web-connected “things” has reached tremendous size and is still rapidly growing. However, it cannot be seen as one homogeneous infrastructure. In fact, most of such “things” are today within vertical silos of IoT platforms that define their own interfaces. This makes it difficult to build cross-platform IoT applications, which eventually results in lost economic opportunities. Hence, this paper presents the BIG IoT approach to close this gap of interoperability. It comprises an API that gains genericness by employing agnostic access interfaces and semantic models that can be adapted to various IoT platforms. We demonstrate an application that shows how to build an overarching ecosystem with this approach.