Rapid Prototyping & Development Life Cycle for Smart Applications of Internet of Entities

A range of new kind of applications are growing for the integration of different technologies and needs such as IoT/IoE (Internet of Things/Everything), WoT (web of things), Digital twins and smart data models, data spaces. These applications demand less attention to the storage modeling since the adopted big data stores are less structured. Therefore, the connection from data storage to visual representation can be more automated. All these aspects open the path for rapid prototyping. In this paper a fast-prototyping development lifecycle for that category of smart applications is proposed. The proposed solution works on heterogeneous data types, push and pull, wide interoperability, covering all aspects from data ingestion to front-end. It can be regarded as a specific declination of AGILE development paradigm in which several activities have been strongly shortened by exploiting a number of modelling facilities of the development environment and technologies. The proposed development lifecycle was defined and tuned for the Snap4City platform, which provides an integrated development environment for rapid prototyping of smart application based on low coding, including visual programming, and a number of visual tools for creating the applications. The solution has been validated in the context of multiple interconnected scenarios of several large-scale projects and pilots such as Herit-Data, Panacea, Resolute, Replicate, TRAFAIR, etc.