Integrating Collective Computing and the Social Internet of Things for Smart Cities: A Vision

Building distributed intelligence is a notable goal for Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart cities. Achieving it requires proper middleware services and application development paradigms able to address inherent challenges in this context like scalability, adaptivity, resource and distributed context management. The Social Internet of Things (SIoT) has shown to contribute in this direction by building a 'social network of things/devices' implied by human relationships (e.g., ownership, collaboration, and frequent interaction), fostering network navigability and service composition. Collective computing, as exemplified by the aggregate computing paradigm, provides the foundation for decentralised information processing and self-organisation. In this vision paper, we consider how these two paradigms - the SIoT and collective computing - can be integrated, what is their role in smart city middleware and applications, and what research should be carried out in this direction.