Thingsourcing to Enable IoT Collaboration

This paper presents thingsourcing to enable thing collaboration in the context of IoT. Compared to crowdsourcing that refers to a crowd of persons, there is limited research in thingsourcing which deprives things from participating in complex business applications. In this paper, thingsourcing is associated with a platform that acts as an IoT marketplace where things sign-up and sign-off looking for opportunities to complete users’ demands. The platform also has a set of mechanisms that allow to describe, search for, and “glue” things together. For demonstration purposes a car service center is used illustrating how things like service bays and vehicles collaborate in compliance with scripts defined in ComPOS (Composition language for Palcom Oblivious Services).