Natural Language for an Interoperable Internet of Simple Things

The universal deployment of the Internet of Things requires interoperability among people, devices and applications. On the other hand, most devices are actually fairly simple things, able to provide only a few specialized pieces of data or to carry out limited actions. We explore here the opportunity and conditions to use natural language as a simple and straightforward vehicle to achieve an interoperability scheme that is universal, support very long lifecycles, break silos and embrace people, devices and applications all together. We identify and compare the different characteristics of natural language processing applied to human-to-machine and to machine-to-machine situations. Finally we demonstrate that a quite simple implementation could match the identified criteria and deliver interoperability in a simple things environment.