1. Thing Broker: A
Twitter for Things
Ricardo A. P. Almeida, Michael Blackstock, Rodger Lea,
Roberto Calderon, Antonio F. Prado, Hélio Crestana
Guardia

2. Outline
 Introduction
 Related Work
 Thing Broker
 Early Applications
 Conclusions and Future Work

3. Web of Things
 Leverages the Web to support the Internet of
Things vision and connect islands of things
 Relies on standard web protocols to name, access,
find and use things (HTTP and RESTful interfaces)
 Can expand the notion of things: not only smart
objects with embedded computing capabilities, but
any uniquely identifiable person, place or thing,
even services

4. Challenges & Motivation
 Huge variety of applications & constraints:
 Resource sharing and interaction between
devices (mobile, public displays)
 Aggregation and visualization of data from
users, mobile phones and situated sensors
 Access to smart meter monitoring data
 Real Time Communication (emergency
response)
 Context aware applications

5. Research Question
 What are the basic abstractions and fundamental
platform features needed to support a wide range
of WoT applications?
 Key Contributions
 Flexible thing/event abstractions
 Twitter-like model for thing relationships
 Initial implementation and early prototype
applications

6. Background
 Evolution of MAGIC Broker 2
 Channels as containers for events and state to represent
things
 Needed flexible thing relationships and event aggregation
 Related to other hubs, but not just just for sensor data
 WoTKit
 Xively
 Open Sen.se
 Thing Speak
 Spacebrew – connect publishers to subscribers
 Inspired by Twitter’s simplicity and power

7. Thing Broker
 Key abstractions: thing and events

8. Thing Broker
 Relationships based on the Twitter communication
abstraction: Follow/Unfollow
 Web-based object referencing – things have URLs
 Web-based object access - HTTP
 Publish/subscribe based communication: push and pull-
based event delivery

9. Modeling Things and
Relationships
thing-
phone
thing-
user
thing-
lamp
thing-
tv
follows
follows
follows follows

10. ThingBroker
Phone AppTV App
Smart Home
Server
Model
Deployment

11. Thing Broker

12. Thing Broker in action
!
!!
Collaborative Picture Galley

13. Thing Broker in action
Digital Message Board
!
!

14. Thing Broker in action
!
!!
Collaborative Picture Galley

15. Thing Broker in action
Meeting Notifier for a Healthcare Scenario
! !

16. Thing Broker in action
Meeting Notifier for a Healthcare Scenario
! !

17. Conclusions
 Thing Broker abstractions and communications
model provides a uniform interface to different Web
of Things entities
 Using a single thing abstraction allows all sorts of
objects, from physical sensors to high-level services
to be modeled by an application
 The following/follows relationship model provides
an abstraction for publish/subscribe style
asynchronous communication between things

18. Conclusions
 Having both push and pull is useful for receiving
real time and historical events
 Based on application development and experiments
to date, the Thing Broker is a simple, and flexible,
yet powerful platform for application development

19. Future Work
 Further investigation about authentication and
encryption is required
 Support for the mobility of things as well as the
production and consumption of continuous data
flows must be addressed
 Adding thing discovery and persistent thing queries

20. Thank You =)
Source Code: https://github.com/ubc-magic/thingbroker
Documentation: https://github.com/ubc-magic/thingbroker/
wiki/Thing-Broker-API

21. References
[1] Blackstock, M., Kaviani, N., Lea, R. and Friday, A. MAGIC Broker 2: An
Open and Extensible Platform for the Internet of Things. Internet of
Things 2010 International Conference (IoT 2010), 1–8.
[2] Blackstock, M. and Lea, R. IoT Mashups with the WoTKit. 3rd
International Conference on The Internet of Things (IOT 2012), 159 –166.
[3] Gubbi, J., Buyya, R., Slaven, M. and Marimuthu, P. Internet of Things
(IoT): A vision, architectural elements, and future directions. http://
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2013.01.010..
[4] Guinard, D. A Web of Things Application Architecture. PhD Thesis. ETH
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, 2011. http://www.webofthings.org/dom/
thesis.pdf.
[5] Open Sen.se Feel, Act, Make sense, Feel, Act, Make sense. http://
open.sen.se/
[6] Ponnekanti, S.R., Johanson, B., Kiciman, E. and Fox, A. “Portability,
Extensibility and Robustness in iROS,” IEEE PerCom, 2003, p. 11.
[7] The Internet of Things – ThingSpeak. https://thingspeak.com/.
[8] Xively - The Internet of Things is Open for Business” https://
www.xively.com