Manifesto

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging and promising area that proposes to turn every tangible entity into a node on the Internet. More specifically, the tangible entities ("things") are any Internet-connected sensor, camera, display, smart phone, or other smart communicating devices. The IoT involves harnessing the data and functionality of possibly billions of things.  Service computing is possibly the best discipline that may transform IoT to its full-potential. Service computing (alternatively termed service-oriented computing) is the discipline that seeks to develop computational abstractions, architectures, techniques, and tools to support services broadly. A service orientation seeks to transform physical, hardware and software assets into a paradigm in which users and assets establish on-demand interactions, binding resources and operations, providing an abstraction layer that shifts the focus from infrastructure and operations to services. Hence, service-oriented IoT should provide novel smart services that benefit enterprises, industries, and our society.

The service computing research community has been continuing to develop IoT services for the last decade. Although there are incremental advancements, we argue that service computing has not fully reached its potential in the designing IoT services. We observe that the "technology" aspect of the service computing domain is more researched in IoT services. For example, continuously maintaining cyber personalities is a key challenge in the service oriented architecture which can be solved using efficient technologies. In this regard, IoT things need to have Web identities and Web representations (e.g., Web proxies) that reflect their physical spaces. Continuously maintaining contexts for IoT devices is another key challenge in the service oriented architecture. Here, IoT devices need to connect and communicate within social, environmental, user-centric, and application contexts, and such contexts need to be maintained and managed. Here, the "technology" aspect of the service computing domain is not a perfect fit to solve this problem.

We argue that enabling service computing to its full-potential (from "technology" to "services") is possible considering the similar analogy in the internet and web.  While the internet was created as "technology" for digital communication, web transformed internet into meaningful services. We identify three key impacts provided by the web over the internet:

1.     Democratization: Web democratization refers to the way people access and contribute to the Internet. In the early internet, the information flow was in only one direction, which was static, with no way for users to add to or interact with the information. However, web emphasizes the importance of people's interactions with the Internet. Everyone has an opportunity to contribute to the Web. And, by paying attention to what users are looking for and doing online, better services are designed over the years.

2.     Commoditization: Web redefines the way business was performed. Web enables the e-commerce using internet as a backbone technology. E-commerce has deeply affected everyday life and how business and governments operate. Commerce is conducted in electronic marketplaces. Consumer-oriented marketplaces include large e-malls, consumer-to-consumer auction platforms, multichannel retailers, and many millions of e-retailers. Massive business-to-business marketplaces have been created using the web. Moreover, web-based sharing economy enables more efficient use of resources. Almost instantaneous access to services is made available by on-demand platforms offering trough web. Such service orientation is not possible using only the concept of internet.

3.     Digitization: Digitization is the process of converting information into digital formats. Web is the largest contributor in digitizing the information. The advantages offered by digitization are the increasing access and preservation of information. Moreover, digitization enables enhanced services. For example, existing resources could be used in a new or different ways. Innovative services can be created using e-learning opportunities in response to user demands.

We believe that similar analogy (i.e., internet to web) is applicable when novel services are designed over IoT technologies. We list some of the impacts of the service oriented IoT:

1.     Smartization: It refers to the process where convenience and efficiency are provided to people through IoT devices. The devices may work in a collaborative way to enable smart services for the people. Example of such systems are smart cities, smart home and smart doctor.

2.     Augmentation: It refers to the process where new services are created on demand by analysing interaction among the devices and human. Service mining is essential to create novel services.

3.     Contextualization: IoT services is not only about transforming sensor data in meaningful and useful entity, but also about defining the internet of actuator. In this context, the involvement of IoT devices may change the context of the acted environment.