Managing the Internet of Things

The number of devices connected to the Internet has increased dramatically in recent years, driven in large part by a new movement called the "Internet of Things" (IoT). With the IoT, new applications for Internet connectivity have emerged beyond just laptops and smartphones, to unite a heterogeneous collection of connecting points tied to various aspects of daily life (e.g., Internet enabled appliances, vehicles and wearable computing devices). As more devices are added to the Internet each day, controlling their interaction has become very challenging. The goal of this project is to create a software solution that will manage connected devices and allow users to specify the meaning of the device interactions. To achieve this, we are currently creating an Internet of Things platform, Wendo, to handle device connections, and a website to manage these devices. The platform is hardware agnostic allowing users to run the software on their own devices that support the communication standards they need. Additionally, Wendo can be extended easily to support new communication standards as they are released. To allow non-programmers to take advantage of our platform, we created ThingScript, a simple domain-specific language that has an English-like syntax that can be adopted by end-users to defme the relationship between devices. We determine what actions can be performed on a device by requiring a thing definition file (.tdef). This file includes information about the actions, events and public data of each device.