TDeX: A Description Model for Heterogeneous Smart Devices and GUI Generation

The fast-growing availability of smart devices is making our environments smarter than ever, but also more and more heterogeneous. Many diverse devices must be integrated and this paper proposes a unified description model and a supporting middleware. Besides focusing on the functional capabilities of the different devices, and on the contexts of use, TDeX, which extends the W3C’s Thing Description model, has been designed to embed descriptions of the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) needed to interact with them. The paper also proposes a model-driven and device-agnostic approach for the automatic generation of these GUIs. M4HSD, our RESTful middleware infrastructure, mediates between the GUIs and the devices themselves and provides a generic and platform-independent solution for the interoperability of Internet/Web of Things systems. Preliminary experiments demonstrate the feasibly of the proposed approach and its innovative characteristics.