Page 40 - Unleashing the potenti al of the Internet of Things

1 Unleashing the potential of the Internet of Things

3.2.3 relation: An association between or among machines or things enabling machines or things
to share or to provide the capability to achieve a task in collaboration. This includes scheduling of
processes between or among machines or things to perform a task.

3.2.4 sociality: The tendency of things or machines to be in the state of socialization.

4 Abbreviations and acronyms

This Recommendation uses the following abbreviations and acronyms:
E-R Entity Relationship
IoT Internet of Things

M2M Machine to Machine
QoS Quality of Service

RFID Radio Frequency Identification
XML Extensible Markup Language

5 Conventions

The keywords "is required to" indicate a requirement which must be strictly followed and from
which no deviation is permitted if conformance to this Recommendation is to be claimed.

The keywords "is recommended" indicate a requirement which is recommended but which is not
absolutely required. Thus this requirement need not be present to claim conformance.

6 Overview of machine socialization

6.1 General overview of machine socialization
The Internet of things (IoT) is defined as a global infrastructure for the information society,
enabling advanced services by interconnecting (physical and virtual) things based on existing and
evolving interoperable information and communication technologies. Through the exploitation of
identification, data capture, processing and communication capabilities, the IoT makes full use of
things to offer services to all kinds of applications, while ensuring that security and privacy
requirements are fulfilled. From a broader perspective, the IoT can be perceived as a vision with
technological and societal implications [ITU-T Y.4000]. Other definitions on the IoT can be found,
however they do not have any significant differences.

According to the existing definitions of the IoT, things or machines collect data (either
environmental or non-environmental) and transfer it to the information world through
communication networks. In other words, current understating of the IoT is reduced to merely a
collection of world-wide sensor networks and radio frequency identification (RFID) systems and
global machine-to-machine (M2M) systems. Though things or machines are interconnected with
one another, the point of interest of the IoT is in providing capability for communication and data
capture to things or machines. However, expectations for the IoT go beyond sensor networks, RFID
and M2M, etc., as these are just some of the enablers for the IoT.

Like the human experience of using social network services to obtain information on the knowledge
and capabilities of other people, unrestricted by barriers of time and place, etc., machines can
communicate and say what they do or what they need, they can follow one another, discuss,
collaborate, create events and do things together. This involves the socialization of machines to a
level corresponding to that of the social relations of humans.

26 Rec. ITU-T Y.4001/F.748.2 (11/2015)