A Real-Time Search Engine for the Web of Things

The increasing penetration of the real world with embedded and globally networked sensors leads to the formation of the Internet of Things, offering global online access to the current state of the real world. We argue that on top of this real-time data, a Web of Things is needed, a software infrastructure that allows the construction of applications involving sensor-equipped real-world entities living in the Internet of Things. A key service for such an infrastructure is a search engine that supports lookup of real-world entities that exhibit a certain current state as perceived by sensors. In contrast to existing Web search engines, such a real-world search engine has to support searching for rapidly changing state information generated by sensors. In this paper, we show how the existing Web infrastructure can be leveraged to support publishing of sensor and entity data. Based on this we present a real-time search engine for the Web of Things.