Organising interoperability information on highly dynamic and heterogeneous environments

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores

The “Internet of Things” is a dynamic global network infrastructure where physical and virtual “things” communicate and share information amongst themselves. Plug and Interoperate is an approach that allows heterogeneous “things” to plug (into data) and seamlessly exchange information within the environment. To allow that, Plug and Interoperate needs to have the comprehension about the existing interoperability information. For this, the interoperability information needs to be duly organised. However, and in the “Internet of Things”, this presents major challenges. First, it is difficult to index all interoperability information due to the “things” heterogeneity (many and different languages and formats) and due to the dynamics of the system (disparate things entering/leaving the environment at all times). Also, that the environment can be used with much different purposes, which hinders the way on how the interoperability information should be organised. So, an architecture of an Interoperability Repository System is presented, in order to organise all interoperability information in this kind of environments. The solution handles heterogeneous interoperability information and allows users to add a User Space to the repository in order to customise it to specific needs. It also provides a notification mechanism in order to notify users of new or updated interoperability information.