From Things to Services: A Social IoT Approach for Tourist Service Management

Abstract

In the context of Internet of Things (IoT), the cooperation and synergy between varied and disparate communicating objects is strained by trustworthiness, confidentiality and interoperability concerns. These restrictions can limit the development of IoT-based applications especially considering the emergent boost in the number of communicating objects and their growing itinerant nature in a collective service context. A new perspective arises with the paradigm of Social Internet of Things (SIoT), that relies on the implementation of semi-independent communicating objects with cooperation assessed by social relations and social feed-back. In this article, we present the development and expansion of the IoT concept towards SIoT in the context of the interactions between tourist services as communicating objects. As a proof-of-concept we propose a composition of services as virtualized social objects and the interaction between them, by taking into consideration the balance, trustworthiness, cooperation and synergy of services. Furthermore we present a solution to integrate also accessibility in SIoT services. The presented concept is presented using a demonstrator build for tourist services.

Keywords

• Enhanced accessibility in SIoT
• socially active virtual services
• services as virtual objects
• socially aware trustworthiness
• the social Internet of Things
• tourist service management