This paper addresses the problem of discovering Web of Things (WoT) agents, also known as servients, that can interact in a mediated or peer-to-peer fashion to form compound systems. We develop a frame-work that relies on the W3C Thing Description (TD) and Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontologies, which provide semantics for the physical world entities WoT servients are associated with.

We formulate the problem of WoT discovery as an abductive reasoning problem over knowledge bases expressed in terms of TD and SSN concepts, where new semantic relationships between existing systems lead to the creation of other, larger systems. We then address the specific case of knowledge bases, a fragment of Description Logic, for which we leverage the mathematical framework of Abductive Logic Programming to provide a concrete algorithm for abduction that terminates in polynomial time.

We illustrate the feasability of our approach on an experimental industrial workstation, equipped with micro-controllers capable of storing and exchanging RDF data in binary format (μRDF store with EXI4JSON serialization).