Internet of Things (IoT) enabled infrastructures, products, and services are revolutionising the way businesses and societies engage and operate. Billions of devices, small and large, are predicted to be connected via Internet over the coming years. These devices and the systems built upon them will be generating huge amount of data and information that would be leveraged for providing different products and services. One of the core components of such systems will be Internet of Things Search Engines (IoTSE) because without customised search engines, it is not possible to detect and use devices, sensors and actuators, that form the IoT systems. Hence, it is important to understand various concepts, technologies, and aspects of IoTSE, which is a complicated and relatively immature research topic. The diversity of IoT systems and the content they generate poses a significant challenge to advance the R&D for IoTSE. To fill this gap, we have produced an article to help easily understand the concepts, classification, and open issues for IoTSE. We are glad to share that this article has been accepted in the ACM Communication magazine, which is one of the top venue for ICT publications. This is the pre-print copy of the article, whose abstract below can provide a brief about the content of the article.
“This article focuses on the complicated yet still relatively immature area of the Internet of Things Search Engines (IoTSE). It introduces related concepts of IoTSE and a model called meta-path to describe and classify IoTSE systems based on their functionality. Based on these concepts, we have organized the research and development efforts on IoTSE into eight groups and presented the representative works in each group. The concepts and ideas presented in this article are generated from an extensive structured study on over 200 works spanning over one decade of IoTSE research and development.“