Everything as a resource: Foundations and illustration through Internet-of-things

This paper presents Everything-as-a-Resource (*aaR) as a paradigm for designing collaborative applications on the Web. Abstracting these applications’ various physical and logical entities, resources are defined in a way that permits their discovery, composition, and participation in business scenarios. Compared to Everything-as-a-Service (*aaS), resources are categorized into computational, consumed, and produced, have trackable lifecycles as per their respective category, and are customized in order to consider the characteristics of future resource-based collaborative applications to develop. From a capacity perspective, a computational resource processes data, a produced resource abstracts data, and a consumed resource captures data. Along with their capacities, resources expose methods that other resources and/or applications’ stakeholders call. The proper call of methods is ensured through restrictions like limited and non-shareable. This paper exemplifies the *aaR paradigm with a case study that revolves around the use of Internet-of-Things (IoT) in the healthcare domain. The case study is implemented in a RESTful fashion along with some standard Web technologies and protocols. The evaluation of IoTR4HealthCare system is benchmarked against two existing systems using cost and latency criteria.