  The Internet of Things (IoT), in general, is a compelling paradigm that aims
to connect everyday objects to the Internet. Nowadays, IoT is considered as one
of the main technologies which contribute towards reshaping our daily lives in
the next decade. IoT unlocks many exciting new opportunities in a variety of
applications in research and industry domains. However, many have complained
about the absence of the real-world IoT data. Unsurprisingly, a common question
that arises regularly nowadays is "Does the IoT already exist?". So far, little
has been known about the real-world situation on IoT, its attributes, the
presentation of data and user interests. To answer this question, in this work,
we conduct an in-depth analytical investigation on real IoT data. More
specifically, we identify IoT data sources over the Web and develop a crawler
engine to collect large-scale real-world IoT data for the first time. We make
the results of our work available to the public in order to assist the
community in the future research. In particular, we collect the data of nearly
two million Internet connected objects and study trends in IoT using a
real-world query set from an IoT search engine. Based on the collected data and
our analysis, we identify the typical characteristics of IoT data. The most
intriguing finding of our study is that IoT data is mainly disseminated using
Web Mapping while the emerging IoT solutions such as the Web of Things, are
currently not well adopted. On top of our findings, we further discuss future
challenges and open research problems in the IoT area.
