Untangling the Physical-Digital Knot When Designing Advanced IoT Ecosystems

Know-how from both the real world and digital domain must be combined when building advanced IoT ecosystems. Although app developers generally have in-depth expertise in one or more verticals, their competences on IoT infrastructure are often limited. This hampers the development of qualitative IoT ecosystems. This paper shows that an early-stage ontological effort incorporating the application domain as well as infrastructural conceptualizations and relations can facilitate the development and management of IoT apps within verticals. Developers can now define app behavior in terms of application-domain conceptualizations, after which infrastructural feedback can automatically be extracted.