A collaboration-focused taxonomy of the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to redefine what it means to collaborate. In light of this potential, we developed a taxonomy to identify how the IoT enables collaboration, and conversely, how our knowledge of collaboration systems can guide IoT system development and research. The taxonomy bridges the technical and human aspects of the IoT by drawing on collaboration and computer network theories. It is also grounded in previously proposed and existing IoT use cases. In this paper, we introduce our current conceptualization of the entire taxonomy and focus on its IoT system complexity dimension. Based on our analysis of the sub-dimensions that make up the system complexity dimension, we identify the need to provide awareness support for the user as a canonical challenge in IoT system design, and articulate why.