IOTDB: bands

This is really one my favorite insights into how Things and APIs work
together. I gave two presentations on Global IoT Day in Vienna about this

http://www.slideshare.net/dpjanes/2015-04-global-io-t-day-wien-interoperability-with-stanardless-iot
http://www.slideshare.net/dpjanes/what-a-thing-api-should-look-like-global-iot-day

So building on the previous message, we have the same definitions for
controlling a thing as reading values of a Thing. How do we differentiate
between these various aspects? Add into the picture that we also have to
deal with _metadata_ and we have to deal with the _model_ (in JSON-LD), how
does this fit?

So here's the key insight: a "Thing" is _not_ JSON dictionary that we
manipulate. Instead a Thing, identified by some Thing ID, is a jumping off
point to a cloud of related but independent JSON dictionaries. These are
(at least):

   - istate - the Input State: the actual state of thing
   - ostate - the Output State: the state we want the thing to become
   - meta - the Thing's metadata
   - model - the Thing's JSON-LD Model

The entire IoT / Web of Things can - and _should_ -  be seen as just
reading an manipulating these four JSON dictionaries! The back end is just
shuffling the data around to the proper point to be actioned!

I'm just going to show this in a slightly different way, because I'm
absolutely in love with this and once you get it it opens up tons of
possibilities for different implementations. The entire "Web of Things" can
just be seen as a table that looks like this

Thing ID | istate | ostate | meta | model


You want to change a Thing?

SET ostate={something} WHERE ThingID={thingid}

You want to set the state of a Thing?

GET istate WHERE ThingID={thingid}

You want to set the metadata?

SET meta={something} WHERE ThingID={thingid}


You want to get the metadata?

GET meta WHERE ThingID={thingid}


You want to know what the istate or ostate actually means?

GET model WHERE ThingID={thingid}


I almost peed myself with excitement once I got this concept. It clarifies
everything.

D.