C.3 IoT Services
C.3.1 Functional Components
IoT Service Resolution
Description The IoT Service Resolution provides all the functionalities
needed by the User in order to find and be able to contact IoT
Services. The IoT Service Resolution also gives Services the
capability to manage their service descriptions (typically stored
in a database as one entry), so they can be looked up and
discovered by the User. The User can be either a Human User
or a software component.
Service descriptions are identified by a service identifier and
contain a service locator that enables accessing the service.
Typically they contain further information like the service
output, the type of service or the geographic area for which the
service is provided. The exact contents, structure and
representation depend on design choices taken, which is left
open at the Reference Architecture level. Examples for service
models (structure) and a service description representations
can be found in D2.1 [Martín 2012].The functionalities offered by the IoT Service Resolution FC in
brief are:Discovery functionality finds the IoT Service without any prior
knowledge such as a service identifier. The functionality is
used by providing a service specification as part of a query.
What can be queried based on a service specification depends
on what is included in the service description. As described
above, this may include the service output, the service type
and the geographic area for which the service is provided. The
representation of the service specification will also be linked to
the service description, e.g. if the service description is
represented in RDF, a service specification based on SPARQL
would be appropriate.Look-up is a functionality which enables the User to access the
service description having prior knowledge regarding the
service identifier.Resolution function resolves the service identifiers to locators
through which the User can contact the Service. As service
locators are typically also included in the service description,
the resolution function can be seen as a convenience function
that reduces the amount of information that has to be
communicated, especially if the service description is large