Process-of-Things: Weaving film industry's practices into the Internet-of-Things

This paper presents a novel way to address the "silo" obstacle that is making things play a limited role in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) arena since they mainly act as data suppliers. This novel way capitalizes on the concept of storytelling to connect things together, which leads to the formation of Process-of-Things (PoT). In compliance with the movie industry's practices, a PoT has a script that identifies the necessary characters (actors) along with what they are expected to do, when, and where. Things, specialized into living and non-living, embody the characters during the shooting (filming) of scripts. 5 phases ensure the completion of this embodiment with emphasis on rehearsal and evaluation stages, in this paper, to guarantee character readiness and appropriateness, respectively. A system implementing PoT's 5 phases is presented in this paper along with a usability study summarizing how end-users, namely farmers, experienced the system. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.