A Domain Model for the Internet of Things

By bringing together the physical world of real objects with the virtual world of IT systems, the Internet of Things has the potential to significantly change both the enterprise world as well as society. However, the term is very much hyped and understood differently by different communities, especially because IoT is not a technology as such but represents the convergence of heterogeneous - often new - technologies pertaining to different engineering domains. What is needed in order to come to a common understanding is a domain model for the Internet of Things, defining the main concepts and their relationships, and serving as a common lexicon and taxonomy and thus as a basis for further scientific discourse and development of the Internet of Things. As we show, having such a domain model is also helpful in design of concrete IoT system architectures, as it provides a template and thus structures the analysis of use cases.