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The IoT (Internet of Things) was first introduced by Kevin Ashton who shown how IoT can be created by “adding radio-frequency identification and other sensors to everyday objects” (Ashton, 2011). Later on it is evolved as an integration of processes such as identifying, sensing, networking and computation. It enables wide range of technology innovation and value-added services which helps user to interact with the technology. Today IoT is used as application in various domains like health, agriculture, remote sensing, smart cities, traffic regulation, automation and many more. Despite all these advancement in technology we are still in nascent stage of IoT. Nascent stage is called because people are still trying to interpret IoT according to their vision and needs. There is no standard definition for IoT, that’s why vision is not completely clear till now. Some of the terms are generated from IoT, such as WoT (Web of Things) (Guinard, Trifa, Mattern, & Wilde, 2011), CoT (Cloud of Things) (Botta, De Donato, Persico, & Pescapé, 2016), M2M (Machine to Machine) (Weyrich, Schmidt, & Ebert, 2014), etc. Some of the characteristics of IoT are as follows:
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Density of Information Resources – It refers to huge volume of information from different resources. This can be done by extracting the records from heterogeneous components (Zhao, Papapetrou, Asker, & Boström, 2017). The density of information is useful for achieving resource density. There is process of liquification and transportation of the information resource across space and time that is conditionally relevant which could enhance the volume of information resources. Liquification can be said as the separation of information from the physical objects that allows to move the information easily (Davies, 2015). It extracts the information from physical object to generate a combination of different information resource and reached at a proper context in most of the cases. Another aspect are innovative information processing and knowledge engineering algorithms, these can be executed on demand, even these are the way through which best combination of resources is mobilizes for a particular context. Liquification is one of the ways through which we can enhance the capabilities of digitized objects. The sensors can provide some detail real time information about the involved devices and transform the information through wireless sensor networks through which we can track and trace things in real time.
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Internet-of-Things as Digital Materiality – If an object is made for any purpose then it is meant to do that only, means if you are having any cloth piece then it is used to make dress material, but we cannot use it for making cup or brick. But by incorporating IoT we can change the normal working of any devices. Digitization can bring multiple features for any single devices means it can perform in multiple ways (Brennen & Kreiss, 2016). Today many of the electronics devices and home appliances are equipped with sensors so that it can perform in more efficient way. Suppose a refrigerator is perform other operation than cooling, like automatic it generates message to the grocery shop about the vegetables which are not present in the refrigerator. Light gets automatically in room when there is no light in the room when someone is present in that.
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Assemblage or service system – Assemblage in IoT means multiple objects or devices working together and it is done because they cannot work severability (Rey, 2012). In the same way when IoT is incorporated into any device again we consider it as assemblage. Assemblage can be considered as collection of heterogeneous components that interact with each other. A doorbell could be an IoT device when it connects through internet and gets automatically alarm when someone stands in front of the door. Sensor will also get connect with the camera for enabling the automatic process.
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Modularity, Transactions and service system - In IoT there are many independent modules and they are independent to each other but for proper functioning they must get connected to each other, means their performance somewhat depend on each other. These modules itself consist of group of element and they are highly dependent to each other. Interactions within a module have high interdependency and ‘thick crossing points’ and therefore no linear or sequential process can be mapped (Douzis, Sotiriadis, Petrakis, & Amza, 2018).