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I keep reading the following every now and then:

By 2020, there will be almost 50 billion nodes connected to the Internet making IoT an important part of life (paraphrasing here)

But even if I scale down to just 50 different sensor nodes in a room, as an end-user (not the developer) how will I know whether which sensor node provides:

  1. Type of measurement : Humidity/Temperature/Pressure etc.
  2. What floating point precision: upto x digits after decimal point
  3. What unit of measurment: C/F or Bar/Pascaletc.

As a developer I can setup the nodes and place them accordingly but some end-user who only uses a Frontend Website to observe values would have no idea if the temperature readings are coming from Sensor x or Sensor y and where particularly is the sensor placed.

I, in fact, have found the keyword for it: Semantics in IoT and am precisely looking for:

  1. implementations/standards

  2. best practices

Are there some more resources that I can look into this field particularly? Any links,repos etc. will be appreciated.

Shan-Desai
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1 Answers1

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Well assuming the end-user is going to be a layman and not a geek, you will have to build and present the whole context around the data that the user is viewing.

Like in your example if a room has 50 sensors and you have set up the nodes, it would be your responsibility to map those nodes to the rooms and the applicances they are connected to.

So lets say for e.g, room A has an AC-A, a light-A and a fan-B and room B has just a light-B and a fan-B and you are just tracking the on off status of these appliances, then you would maintain this mapping between the appliances and rooms typically in a backend database like so,

Columns - Id Type Name Room

Row1 - 1 Fan FanA BedRoom

Row2 - 2 Fan FanB SmallBedRoom

etc... Then while displaying the data to the user in your app you can show something like...

Room A

 FanA - Off

 Ac   - On

Room B

 FanB - On

 LightB - On

So now the user exactly knows which devices are placed in which rooms and the status of each of those devices and that is what the end user is interested in.

Hope that helps.

Subbu
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