Research On Smart Object-Oriented Information Representation

Smart Objects are core components in the Internet of Things.Heterogeneous Smart Objects are used in different kinds of applications.However,the existing architectures for Smart Object highlight the underlying communication protocol while ignoring the information representation associated with domain information environment.There is no universal markup language for resource-constrained Smart Objects.These problems make it difficult to implement scalability and interoperability for heterogeneous Smart Objects in cross-platform/cross-system applications.These challenges are particularly serious problems in Automatic Identification Technologies(AIT)integration in large-scale open-loop supply chain application systems.The study of these problems has important academic value,technology value,and engineering value for Smart Object's cognition,design,and application,and for system integration of the Internet of Things.Focusing on the above challenges,we explore Smart Object 's common architecture and its information environment,analyze the features and typical methods of Information representation,design the new IDentifier-based Markup Language(IDML)for resource-constrained Smart Objects,and apply the above theories and methods to AIT application in a large-scale supply chain system.Our innovations include the following three aspects.First,to abstract the common features of Smart Objects,we present an architecture model to decouple information by hierarchical abstraction.This model includes three layers from bottom to top,namely interaction layer,information/data layer,and function/service layer,respectively.The information/data layer is the carrier of information,and the information structure includes syntax,semantics,and pragmatics from bottom to top,respectively.The interaction layer implements the syntax of information and the function/service layer implements the pragmatics of information.The extensive form of information structure is the Information/Digit Field(I/DF),which is the core content of the information environment.The domain standard system and parsing service system are the two forms of the I/DF.This theory can improve the information interoperability of open-loop systems.Second,we point out that the feature of markup language is “Structure for Association between Keys and their Values”,and then design a new markup language IDML for resourceconstrained Smart Objects.The IDML can express three kinds of data models,namely sequential data,relational data,and hierarchical data,respectively.The latter two are presented with the name IDTable and IDTree respectively.Compared wi th JSON,IDML can improve the presentation efficiency by about 50%.Third,we design the architecture of information collaboration for AIT application in a large-scale supply chain.With IDML,we satisfy the need for the dynamic definition of data format i n resource-constrained AIT tags and the need for multi-sensors' self-describing representation and their sensory data.Focusing on the challenge about vertical information collaboration between AIT tags and their related host systems,and on the challenge about horizontal information collaboration between upstream stakeholders and downstream stakeholders in the supply chain,we allocate AIT tags by item-layer in the supply chain,and design data modularity in AIT tags,and construct the information environment for AIT tags,which is associated with the information environment for the host information system.