Advertising semantically described physical items with Bluetooth Low Energy beacons

Enabling smart applications to access information about the physical world in a machine interpretable format is a high priority in the Internet of Things (IoT) related research. In this paper, we present a novel approach for advertising information related to physical objects in the user vicinity. There are three distinctive features in our approach. First, ubiquitous codes (ucodes) are used for providing globally unique identifiers for the physical objects. Second, we use Bluetooth Low Energy beacons for broadcasting the identifiers of the physical objects. Third, the information related to the physical object is represented with semantic technologies. In order to verify our approach we have developed an example application for iPhone 4S. The application presents the current physical objects in the user vicinity and shows selected information about these objects.