Summary

Recommendation ITU-T Y.4203 specifies requirements for an effective way of representing things, as far as possible, in a homogeneous way.

The things description is a tool to realise the representation of physical things as virtual things of the information world to facilitate automatization, interoperability and composability for the Internet of things (IoT) applications. Things description specifies a general way for how to map physical things in the physical world to virtual things in the information world to enable things of the IoT to be effectively discovered, interpreted and used.

The focus of this Recommendation is on the following two concerns of things description:

1)          representing physical things as virtual things to map physical things into the information world;

2)          representing the relationship of virtual things to reflect the relationship of the represented physical things.

The corresponding requirements of things description in the IoT are specified, including:

–           high‑level requirements of things description in IoT;

–           requirements on the characterization aspects of things description in IoT.

This Recommendation may be relevant for the matters addressed by Recommendation ITU-T Y.4114 "Specific requirements and capabilities of the Internet of things for big data", e.g., semantic related data processing.