Blog

<p>The majority of sample IoT applications available online, including <a href="/">many of our own</a>, use <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON">JSON</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML">XML</a> or some other simple, human-readable, text-based format. It makes sense because it's easy to show the data at various parts of the application, it's easy to create new demo data, and it's easy to work with JSON data in server-side data services because it's a well-supported format for web-based services.</p>
<p>But in the real world of connected devices, not all IoT data will look like JSON or XML. System designers are already concerned about the bandwidth use of the oncoming wave of devices and are advocating for leaner, more compact formats. In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuIyESNLACo">his keynote</a> at ARM TechCon 2015 earlier this month, Google's Colt McAnlis encouraged developers to be looking at lighter-weight binary protocols like <a href="https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/">FlatBuffers</a> or <a href="https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/?hl=en">protocol buffers</a>.</p>
<p>And of course, an increasing number of IoT solutions will incorporate audio and video streams&mdash;either as primary or as additional sources of IoT data. For example, security monitoring systems or advanced sensors attached to machinery watching product output as part of an industrial quality control system both involve the collection, transmission, and analysis of audio streams.</p>
<p>The following video demonstrates how binary data can be transmitted across and manipulated within the wot.io operating environment.</p>
<p><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wYte433TE8s" frameborder="0" width="420" height="315" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>Properly working with binary data isn't trivial, and it's an important aspect of an enterprise-caliber data routing system. wot.io adapters and its operating environment work independently from the payload its messages carry, and can therefore accept and route messages with payloads of arbitrary format. Allowing adapters to flexibly consider message payloads alternately as either opaque blobs or as transparent, structured data proves to be immensely valuable in real-world industrial IoT scenarios.</p>
<p>In fact, the wot.io data service exchange&trade; has a number of data services like <a href="http://nervve.com/">Nervve</a> and <a href="http://www.datascription.com/">Datascription</a> that provide search, transcription, and metadata extraction from binary audio and video streams. If you'd like to learn more about these and other data services, <a href="http://www.wot.io/contact/">contact wot.io</a> today!</p>