Discovery and synchronization of thing descriptions in a distributed architecture

Proprietary systems and isolated solutions still dominate the Internet of Things, making interoperability and flexibility between IoT platforms difficult. The W3C Web of Things is emerging as a solution to improve the integration of IoT devices and services across multiple IoT platforms and application domains by leveraging and extending existing, standardized web technologies. To semantically describe Things, WoT has defined the Thing Description specification. Thing Descriptions can be distributed in a wide variety of environments. In this paper a concept is presented to discover and retrieve Thing Description network-independently. The collected Thing Descriptions are then available via a web service. Due to different network structures, the effort faces some challenges which will be descripted in this work.