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Alex Lobunets edited this page Aug 20, 2014 · 6 revisions

The Service Catalog is in its early design stage, but the idea is the following. Similar to what the Device Catalog does to describe available IoT devices and resources (and their APIs), the Service Catalog will describe middleware services available in the network.

The Service Catalog is expected to be the entry point for applications using LinkSmart, mainly to discover available services in the network. We plan to use zeroconf (e.g., DNS-SD) to advertise the endpoint of the Service Catalog, such that applications and services can be deployed without manual configuration.

The idea is that anything that is meant to be discovered by applications and other services, which can be called a “service” and is not a physical device or a “virtual sensor” worth being considered as such goes in the Service Catalog. Examples: (global) Device Catalog, Message Broker, etc.

Just like devices, the services are expected to be different: talk different protocols, use different data formats, etc. There is a Registration format describing such capabilities (which are yet to be discussed), but we are currently expect to have something similar to the format used in the Device Catalog.

The Service Catalog API is also REST/JSON-based, similar to the Device Catalog API with CRUD for services registering themselves and search API for applications. Unlike the Device Catalog though, we expect to have only a “global" Service Catalog in the network. The cases with large-scale federated network deployments and hierarchical/distributed discovery are also to be considered