Resource: A connection between Internet of Things and Resource-Oriented Architecture

The Internet of Things (IoT) appears like a new paradigm in the globalization process. The term "Things" refers to the interconnected smart elements of any kind and purpose that can be located anywhere and interact with each other according to the predefined protocol. Because of the unlimited variety of different structures and behavior, it is essential to find the way to uniformly represent and implement the IoT in the real world environment. Referring the good practice of distributed Internet systems, like service oriented architecture (SOA), an implementation of IoT as a resource, that appears like the "black box" from the users' point of view, looks promising. The analysis of service oriented architecture and IoT, and subsequently, the selection between SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and REST (Representational State Transfer) implementation style are presented in this paper. Because the main building element of REST services is a resource, REST appears as a "natural" choice for IoT description. Thus, the usage of REST services for describing IoT, and adequate system and its implementation, based on this idea, are presented in this paper too.