Including cyberphysical smart objects into digital libraries

Digital libraries are distributed software infrastructures that aim at collecting, managing, preserving, and using digital objects (or resources) for the long term, and providing specialized services on such resources to its users. Service provision should be of measurable quality and performed according to codified policies. Currently, modern digital libraries include a wide range of conventional digital objects: text document, image, audio, video, software, etc. In the emerging domain of the Internet of Things (IoT), cyberphysical smart objects (or simply smart objects) will play a central role in providing new (smart) services to both humans and machines. It is therefore challenging to include smart objects, the newest type of digital objects, into digital libraries as novel first-class objects to be collected, managed, and preserved. However, their inclusion poses critical issues to address and many research challenges to deal with. This paper aims at paving the way towards such a novel inclusion that will enable effective discovery, management and querying of smart objects. In particular, our approach is based on a metadata model purposely defined to describe all the cyberphysical characteristics (geophysical, functional, and non-functional) of smart objects. The metadata model is then used for a seamless integration of smart objects into digital libraries compliant with the digital library reference model proposed by the DL.org community. The proposed approach is also exemplified through a simple yet effective case study.