Size considerations
The Internet of things would encode 50 to 100 trillion objects, and be
able to follow the movement of those objects. Human beings in surveyed
urban environments are each surrounded by 1000 to 5000 trackable
objects. In 2015 there were already 83 million smart devices in people‘s
homes. This number is about to grow up to 193 million devices in 2020
and will for sure go on growing in the near future.
The figure of online capable devices grew 31% from 2016 to 8.4 billion
in 2017.
Space considerations
In the Internet of things, the precise geographic location of a
thingóand also the precise geographic dimensions of a thingówill be
critical. Therefore, facts about a thing, such as its location in time
and space, have been less critical to track because the person
processing the information can decide whether or not that information
was important to the action being taken, and if so, add the missing
information (or decide to not take the action). (Note that some things
in the Internet of things will be sensors, and sensor location is
usually important.) The GeoWeb and Digital Earth are promising
applications that become possible when things can become organized and
connected by location. However, the challenges that remain include the
constraints of variable spatial scales, the need to handle massive
amounts of data, and an indexing for fast search and neighbor
operations. In the Internet of things, if things are able to take
actions on their own initiative, this human-centric mediation role is
eliminated. Thus, the time-space context that we as humans take for
granted must be given a central role in this information ecosystem. Just
as standards play a key role in the Internet and the Web, geospatial
standards will play a key role in the Internet of things.
A solution to “basket of remotes”
Many IoT devices have a potential to take a piece of this market.
Jean-Louis Gassťe (Apple initial alumni team, and BeOS co-founder) has
addressed this topic in an article on Monday Note, where he predicts
that the most likely problem will be what he calls the “basket of
remotes” problem, where we’ll have hundreds of applications to
interface with hundreds of devices that don’t share protocols for
speaking with one another. For improved user interaction, some
technology leaders are joining forces to create standards for
communication between devices to solve this problem. Others are turning
to the concept of predictive interaction of devices, “where collected
data is used to predict and trigger actions on the specific devices”
while making them work together.