A method of message adaptation in the Internet of Things (IoT) including a data center having a plurality of applications, an application gateway, a wide area network, a network of access appliances and a plurality of sensing devices. The method includes receiving at the application gateway a message containing data collected by the plurality of sensors, the message having a message descriptor; parsing at the application gateway the message according to the message descriptor; generating at the application gateway a message template based on the parsed message descriptor; storing at the application gateway the generated message template in memory; integrating context information into the generated message template; and outputting the message with the generated message template from the application gateway to a corresponding application in the data center for content-based processing.