As noted by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, it’s not the docu- ments that are actually interesting, it’s the things they’re about.1 The last level of abstraction for the Web is to connect physical things. With recent advances in RFID, wireless sensors net- works, and Web services, the Internet of Things (IoT) offers the capability of integrating informa- tion from both the physical and virtual worlds. With IoT, it becomes possible to infer the status of real-world entities with minimal delay using a standard Web browser.2,3 IoT is the embodiment of the evolution from systems linking digital documents to systems relating digital information to real-world physical items. While it’s well understood that IoT offers numerous opportunities and benefits, it also pres- ents significant technical challenges in develop- ing applications in the IoT environment (see the related sidebar discussing others’ efforts).2,4 One of the main challenges is to smoothly and seamlessly integrate the virtual and physical worlds to effec- tively manage things of interest (TOIs) in IoT.5-7 This is critical for a number of important appli- cations, such as object discovery (for example, finding a quiet restaurant), recommendation (sug- gesting a device that can consume a video stream), and mashup (composing device functionalities for a new service). A crucial prerequisite is acknowl- edging the seamless information access, exchange, and manipulation between the two worlds.