Searching sensor and actuator interfaces on Webs, not a few industry standards are identified. Many of them are for manufacturing or factory automations. On the other hand, studies on IoT (Internet of Things) are in progress. It is possible to develop new sensors and actuators for IoT. However considering that the effective use of well populated sensors and actuators in markets, it is more practical to develop inter-operability of IoT not on a device level.

As many use cases have been developed considering the effective use of IoT technologies, such as smart cities, systems are converged to a three layer model which includes IoT devices, IoT gateways and IoT cloud. Interfaces are defined between layers and level of abstraction of IoT increases as going away from IoT devices. For instance, IoT devices are defined as piece of information on IoT cloud. When a use case allows a latency of information exchange between application and IoT devices, inter-operability of IoT should be developed on IoT cloud level. And when a use case does not allow latency, such IoT device should be owned by the use case.

Inter-operability of IoT is developed by defining an entity corresponding to IoT devices on an information system. This entity is also recognized as an object and very similar to managed objects used for network operations and management. Given not a few classes of IoT will exist, these object definitions should be machine readable and well manipulated by applications.

As a mechanism to meet above mentioned requirements, HyperCat project is progressing in UK, in which objects are defined in JSON notations following Restful architectural style. HyperCat project should be cautiously monitored.

Nobuo FUJII was working for NTT R&D and NTT Groups where he studied and developed transport network operation systems. He also worked for ITU-T and other standard organizations, fora and consortia so as to develop operation system architectures and interfaces. He is an IEICE fellow. He joined CCI in 2014.