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.