Modeling and Simulating the Web of Things from an Information Retrieval Perspective

Abstract

Internet and Web technologies have changed our lives in ways we are not even fully aware. In the near future, Internet will interconnect more than 50 billion of things of the real world, nodes will sense billions of features of interest and properties, and things will be represented with Web-based bi-directional services with high-dynamic content and real-time data. This is the new era of the Internet and the Web of Things. The emergence of such paradigms implies the evolution and integration of the systems which they interact with. Thereby, it is essential to develop abstract models for representing, and simulating the Web of Things in order to establish new approaches. A model of the Web of Things based on a structured XML representation is described in this paper. We also present a simulator whose ultimate goal is to encapsulate the expected dynamics of the Web of Things, for the future development of Information Retrieval (IR) systems. The simulator generates a real-time collection of XML documents, which contain spatio-temporal contexts, textual and sensed information with highly dynamic dimensions. The simulator is characterized among others for its flexibility and versatility to represent real-world scenarios and a unique perspective from information retrieval, we tested the simulator in terms of fundamentals variables.