Interaction semantics and its implications for an interaction oriented architecture of IoT-type applications

Abstract

Several synergistic trends, subsumed under the phrase "Internet of things (IoT)" massively drive the increasing importance of networking applications. In the past, the exponential growth of the Internet was mainly due to semantically agnostic transport protocols. In the future it is to be expected that, because of the increasing autonomy of technical systems, it becomes necessary to better understand the nature of the semantics of these interaction networks to create appropriate networking applications. Appropriate means that the architecture of these applications allows to minimize the effort to adapt these applications to the permanently changing interaction networks. The proposed interaction oriented architecture is based on a reference model of interaction semantics. It provides guiding principles on how to design networking applications. The reference model of interaction semantics provides: a unifying description of the things in the physical, the information and the human world; an interaction model that is of direct runtime relevance; an understanding for how hierarchical structured components can cooperate loosely coupled; a concept to determine how much semantics has to be common to enable components of different semantic domains to cooperate loosely coupled; and a data type model. The software reference architecture provides: a definition of software layers; means to express vertical interactions, that is interactions which demarcate a software layer; means to express horizontal interactions, that is, between processes in the same software layer; a definition of a component and how to distinguish it from other entities like systems or objects; and a model how to separate reusable from non-reusable parts of an application's functionality.