Extending W3C Thing Description to Provide Support for Interactions of Things in Real-Time

The continuous growth of the Web of Things allows us to find devices with different characteristics. This variety of devices favours the creation of heterogeneous intelligent environments that also makes interoperability between them difficult. This is why both the scientific community and consortiums such as the W3C are working on solutions to improve the interoperability. In this sense, the W3C has recently proposed W3C Thing Description standard that allows the modeling and description of smart things in order to improve the interoperability among them. However, the interoperability provided improves the interactions between the devices, but does not make it possible to define when these interactions should occur. This provides the standard with an extra level of interoperability, which is required to optimize interactions between situation-dependent devices. This work presents an extension of the W3C Thing Description to provide it with the ability to adapt the description and the interoperability of the devices to the situation at run-time. This allows devices to connect to each other being aware of the different situations they may be involved in to establish smarter and real-time communications.