IoT is a collection of objects (e.g., sensors, computers, mobile devices, RFID tags etc.) with unique identifiers that are able to detect the presence of nearby objects and exchange data with one another using wireless and wired networks connected to the Internet in order to reach a common goal (Atrozi et al, 2010).
The definition of IoT varies depending on from which perspective you look at it – Internet-oriented, Things-oriented or semantic-oriented perspective. The Semantic-oriented IoT approach is based on the idea that the number of objects involved in the future Internet will be very high, making representing, storing, interconnecting, searching and organizing information generated by IoT to be very challenging.
IoT shifts the Internet from interconnected computers to interconnected things. It expands the "anywhere, anytime" ubiquitous computing paradigm to "anywhere, anytime, anything”.
Three IoT components enable seamless ubiquitous computing:
- Hardware – comprises of sensors, actuators and embedded communication hardware,
- Middleware – on demand storage and computing tools for data analytics,
- Presentation – easy to understand visualization and interpretation tools that can be widely accessed on different platforms and can be designed for different applications.
