A Visual Paradigm for IoT Solutions Development - Interoperability and Open-Source Solutions for the Internet of Things - page 25

A Visual Paradigm for IoT
Solutions Development

Nikos Kefalakis 1( & ) , John Soldatos 1 , Achilleas Anagnostopoulos 2 ,
and Panagiotis Dimitropoulos 2

1 Athens Information Technology, 0,8 Km Markopoulo Ave.,
P.O. Box 68, 19002 Peania, Greece
{nkef,jsol}@ait.gr
2 SENSAP Microsystems AE, Hydras 2, 18346 Moschato, Greece
{aanag,pdimi}@sensap.eu

Abstract. Despite the proliferation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications and
services, there are still very few tools and techniques for developing IoT solu-
tions in a visual fashion through minimal (or even) zero programming. In this
paper we introduce a novel approach for developing IoT solution through visual
development tools. The presented approach presents several advantages, in
particular: (a) It leverages standards-based semantic models for sensors and IoT
context (notably the W3 SSN ontology), (b) It is based on popular/mainstream
web-based technologies (i.e. SPARQL, REST), (c) It provides a basis for
integrated development of IoT services on the basis of a W3C SSN based Model
Driven Architecture (MDA), (d) It is implemented as open source software as
part of the OpenIoT open source project.

Keywords: Internet-of-Things (IoT) Visual tools Cloud computing

Sensors Open source

1 Introduction

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) (Sundmaeker 2010 ) is gradually becoming one of the most
prominent technologies that underpin our society, through enabling the orchestration
and coordination of large numbers of physical and virtual Internet-Connected-Objects
(ICO) towards human-centric services in a variety of sectors including logistics, trade,
industry, smart cities and ambient assisted living (Smith 2012 ). Nowadays, more than
ten years after the introduction of the term IoT (Internet-of-Things) (Ashton 2009 ), we
have witnessed the emergence of several IoT architectures and related technical stan-
dards, which have paved the ground for the

rst wave of scalable, intelligent and
interoperable IoT applications. Prominent examples of such IoT architectures are those
promoted by standardization organizations, such as the Open Geospatial Consortium
(OGC) ( http://www.opengeospatial.org ) , the W3C (through its W3C Semantic Sensor
Networks (SSN) incubator group) and the EPCglobal ( http://www.gs1.org/epcglobal/ ) .
These architectures are in most cases supported by middleware platforms, which
facilitate development and integration of (compliant) IoT applications. For example, the
Fosstrak open source platform ( http://www.fosstrak.org ) (Floerkemeier et al. 2007 )