Poster: Smart buildings, sensor networks, and the Internet of Things

In contrast to traditional sensor networks, the "Internet of Things" focuses on interactions between humans and physical objects rather than on sensing and reporting low level information. While several middle-ware systems have been created to simplify the task of managing and aggregating data from multiple sensor networks that use different hardware and software, management of the data is not sufficient to build an Internet of Things.To build a smart home or office application, information from sensors and existing infrastructure, such as networked power supplies and printers, need to be associated with physical objects. As low-level data is processed, it can be fed back into the system to support higher-level results. In this paper we introduce Octopus, an open-source, dynamically extensible system that supports data management and fusion for Internet of Things applications.