The successful study of any subject begins with using good definitions. Without clear definitions, the boundaries become fuzzy and immediate consequences and implications become unclear. The term Internet of Things started as a visionary statement, a buzz word, rather than a definition. While the term has enjoyed exceptional media coverage, the visionary statement has been interpreted differently by different people.
The term is normally considered to be coined by Kevin Ashton in 1999 when he described a future where things such as barcode readers would be directly connected to the internet, without the interference of humans. Humans were likened to bad, slow, and error prone routers. While “things” had already been connected to the internet way before this statement, the term had not been coined yet. The utility sector, for instance, had long used connected meters to retrieve meting data automatically. This was first done using modems and the phone network already in the late 70s and 80s. When ISPs began providing internet access locally, switching to the internet became a way to reduce costs, since local phone calls could be used instead of long distance calls. Even the internet itself is a network of things. Computers and servers are naturally things that are connected. But here, thing has come to mean non-computer-thing, even though the thing must have a small computer inside, to be able to connect...confusing…
So, to avoid any further confusion, let’s provide a clear definition of what the Internet of Things is.
The Internet of Things is what you get when you connect things that are not operated by humans to the internet.
This definition has four clear areas of study that we will introduce in this book:
- How to connect things; this is the study of communication protocols.
- The study of things; this includes concepts such as sensors, actuators, controllers, concentrators, bridges, and so on.
- Things are considered not operated by humans; do differentiate them from normal computers. This requires them to make their own decisions and act alone. This leads to the study of decision support, artificial intelligence, and so on.
- Being connected to the internet means the things become neighbors with all the world's criminals, hackers, and curious teenagers at once. Since things are supposedly not operated by humans, and work possibly for years unsupervised, the study of security becomes acute. IoT inherits all security issues related to building information systems on the internet.
While the Internet of Things has seen a lot of development in the first two areas mentioned previously, the last two are underdeveloped and often omitted. This has lead people such as James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence in the USA, to state that America’s Greatest Threat is the Internet of Things (http://www.popsci.com/clapper-americas-greatest-threat-is-internet-things).
