The expected dramatic growth of connected things raises the issue of how to efficiently organize them, in order to monitor and manage functions and interactions. Information centric networking (ICN) is a communication paradigm that provides content-oriented functionality in the network and at the network level, including content routing, caching, multicast, mobility, data-centric security, and a flexible namespace. Thus, it is a viable solution for supporting Internet of Things (IoT) services without requiring any centralized entity. In this paper, we introduce the lightweight named object solution: a convenient way to represent physical IoT objects in a derived name space, exploiting ICN. We show that this abstraction can: 1) increase the programming simplicity; 2) offer extended functionality, such as augmentation and upgrading, to cope with the ‘software erosion,’ and 3) implement a common interaction logic involving mutual function invocation. We present some proof-of-concept implementations of the proposed abstraction dealing with challenging IoT test cases; we also carry out a performance evaluation in a simulated network scenario. © 2014 IEEE.