Student Perspectives is our series of guest posts written by current #citylis students.
This post is by current #citylis student, Reham Alharbi, and is an introduction to the Internet of Things.
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To begin with, what does it mean?
Internet of Things (IoT) is “A dynamic global network infrastructure with self-configuring capabilities based on standard and interoperable communication protocols where physical and virtual “things” have identities, physical attributes, and virtual personalities and use intelligent interfaces, and are seamlessly integrated into the information network.” (Vermesan and Friess, 2013).
In other words, the internet of things is a way of connecting all the things in our lives to the Internet or to each other to send and receive data to perform specific functions through the network.
You may think what do I mean by ‘things’ well; literally, it can be anything such as clothing, furniture, watches, devices, humans, etc.
How does it work?
In order to make those things smart and connect it to the internet, we need to give it a unique identity, connect it to the internet via WiFi, and the most important thing is to attach things with sensors technology because it is the way to transmit a wide verity of data like locations and temperature.
Some advantages of using IoT:
-connect with things which give us the opportunity to know anything about everything around us.
-monitor things, for example, using a gadget to observe or health
-Search things for example if car keys are tagged it would easy to find it by asking Google.
Referring to the knowledge hierarchy, many believe that using the internet of things will help us reach wisdom as following where ‘The lower layer refers to large amount of data produced by the IoT resources and devices. The layer above helps create structured and machine-readable information from the raw data of various forms to enhance interoperability. However, what is required by humans and high-level applications and services often is not the information, but high-level abstractions and perceptions that provide human and machine-understandable meanings and insights of the underlying data. The high-level abstractions and perceptions then can be transformed to actionable intelligence (wisdom) with domain and background knowledge to exploit the full potential of IoT and create end-to-end solutions.’ (Barnaghi et al., 2012).
Finally, the internet of things seems perfect, but unfortunately, security is a rising concern in IoT which need to be working on to reach a better level of security.
References:
Barnaghi, P., Wang, W., Henson, C. and Taylor, K. (2012) ‘Semantics for the Internet of things’, International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems, 8(1), pp. 1–21. doi: 10.4018/jswis.2012010101.
Vermesan, O. and Friess, P. (eds.) (2013) Internet of things: Converging technologies for smart environments and integrated ecosystems. Aalborg: River Publishers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaTIt1C5R-M
Pictures:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things#/media/File:Internet_of_Things.jpg
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.474.1237&rep=rep1&type=pdf
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You can follow Reham on Twitter.
This post is an edited version of the original which was published on the author’s blog on 14th November 2016.
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