Spaces of Things: Application-Level Abstractions for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm focuses on a network of objects, where devices communicate with human beings as well as other devices. This paper focuses on the identification of suitable metaphors and concepts for building IoT applications. It proposes an approach grounded on the contextualization of objects and their information in one or more spaces of things, defined according to different physical and logical spatial models. The approach promotes the seamless integration and interaction of heterogeneous components. The paper presents the conceptual model, the related software architecture and an experimental application in the logistics domain.