A social and pervasive IoT platform for developing smart environments

Nowadays, the increasing in the use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is growing the realization of pervasive Smart Environments (SEs) and Smart Urban Ecosystems, where all the data gathered by the “Things” can be elaborated and used to improve the livability, the safety and the security of the environment, and to make inhabitants lives easier. Many efforts have been already done in the direction of SEs development and in the implementation of platforms specifically designed for SE realization. Anyway, such efforts miss of solutions regarding the interoperability among the realized SEs and other third-part “Things”. This chapter gives an overview of iSapiens, which is a Java-based platform specifically designed for the development and implementation of SEs. iSapiens tries to overcome the interoperability issue by leveraging the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) paradigm that allows to dynamically include in an SE the new “Things” that can appear in an environment without requiring interventions from humans. iSapiens provides tools for the realization of pervasive SEs and relies on the edge computing paradigm. Such paradigm is extremely important in a distributed system since it allows to use distributed storage and computation at the edge of a network, so reducing latencies with respect to move all the executions and storages in the cloud. Moreover, the chapter will review some SE applications realized by exploiting iSapiens concepts.