IR.WoT: An Architecture and Vision for a Unified Web of Things Search Engine

The revolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Web of Things (WoT) has brought new opportunities and challenges for the information retrieval (IR) field. The exponential number of interconnected physical objects and real-time data acquisition requires new approaches and architectures for IR systems. Research and prototypes can be crucial in designing and developing new systems and refining architectures for IR in the WoT. This paper proposes a unified and holistic approach for IR in the WoT, called IR.WoT. The proposed system contemplates the critical indexing, scoring, and presentation stages applied to some smart cities' use cases and scenarios. Overall, this paper describes the research, architecture, and vision for advancing the field of IR in the WoT and addresses some of the remaining challenges and opportunities in this exciting area. The article also describes the design considerations, cloud implementation, and experimentation based on a simulated collection of synthetic XML documents with technical efficiency measures. The experimentation results show promising outcomes, whereas further studies are required to improve IR.WoT effectiveness, considering the WoT dynamic characteristics and, more importantly, the heterogeneity and divergence of WoT modeling proposals in the IR domain.