A saref:Operation is the means of a service to communicate in a procedure-type manner over the network (i.e. transmit data to/from other devices). It is the –machine interpretable– exposure of a –human understandable– command to a network.

Operation

In the set of operations exposed by a smart washing machine on a given network, one may be dedicated to set the water temperature for the washing cycle, and expected as input a enumerated value. Another one may be dedicated to start, pause, or stop the washing cycle.

In the set of operations exposed by a smart light bulb on a given network, one may be dedicated to turn on and off the light and expect a boolean as input. Another one may be dedicated to set the luminosity status and expect a target luminosity level (a byte) and a transition time (encoded on two bytes).

To turn on a light, send a CoAP PUT request with CBOR content 0xf5 (true)

V3.2.1: Introduced saref:Operation and associated properties from oneM2M base ontology.

Typically, a device connected to a given network offers one service for each of its functions of interest, and each service has one operation per command of interest of the function of interest it represents.

An operation may be described in terms of its inputs and outputs using OP saref:hasInput and saref:hasOutput. Inputs and outputs of operations typically describe the expected schema or shape of network messages.