At last! We eventually have a document that vulgarizes the Internet and the Web of Things, oh JOY! I’ll be able to illustrate to mom/sister/grand children (I’ll have to wait a while for that though 
) what I’ve been doing for the last 7 years of my life without having them go like: “hmmm oooookayyyyyy”! The one and only problem: the article is in … French. Désolé!
(Source: SVJ)
When Olivier Lascar, from Science et Vie Junior asked if I would be interested in participating to an article about the Internet of Things targeted towards teens I just couldn’t resist, especially since, as a kid, I never missed an issue of the magazine! A couple of interviews hours later and here we go: si vous parlez Français, je suis sûr que vous allez comme moi aimer cet article. It is a savory mix between vulgarization and facts, something that anyone (I believe) can more or less relate to, with plenty of well picked examples. The magazine is still on sale (SVJ 268), so get a printed copy. If you can’t, SVJ provided us with a free PDF version for our readers: L’Internet des Objets, SVJ 268
Remarks and commentaires are very welcome, as comme toujours!
After WoT 2010 in Mannheim, WoT 2011 in San Fransisco, we are happy to announce WoT 2012 co-located with Pervasive 2012 in Newcastle, UK.
Over the last few years, WoT has profiled itself as a major event for the Web of Things community and we can’t wait to see y’all there once again. So, get your ideas/projects/prototypes ready, set, submit!
CALL FOR PAPERS – Third International Workshop on the Web of Things (WoT 2012)
in conjunction with Pervasive 2012, Newcastle, June 18-22, 2012.
Paper submission deadline: March 9, 2012
Notification of acceptance: April 2, 2012
Camera-ready papers due: April 20, 2012
Workshop date: June 19, 2012
Official Website
The world of embedded devices has experienced radical changes over the past few years. Real-world objects, or “Things”, such as home appliances, industrial machines, and wireless sensor and actuator networks embed powerful computers which often are connected to the Internet. Chumby, Gumstix, Sun SPOTs, Ploggs, Nabaztag, and ioBridges as well as the proliferation of data aggregation platforms like pachube are just a few examples of the rapid development of such connected embedded computers. The convergence of sensing, computing and Internet-scale networking provides new design opportunities and challenges, as digital communication networks will increasingly contain real-world devices and allow direct read/write interactions with them. While the “Internet of Things” has become a legitimate research domain in the pervasive and ubiquitous computing communities, its main focus has been on establishing connectivity on the network level in a variety of challenging and constrained environments. As these lower-level, technical problems are being solved, a whole new world of higher-level problems open up. The “Web of Things” is the next logical step in this evolution towards global networks of sensors and actuators, enabling new applications and providing new opportunities. The Web of Things explores the layer on top of connectivity with Things and addresses issues such as fast prototyping, data integration, and interaction with objects. Because the Web is omnipresent and flexible enough, it has become as an excellent protocol for interacting with embedded devices, and the Web of Things is a vision where things become seamlessly integrated into the Web – not just through Web-based user interfaces of custom applications, but by reusing the architectural principles of the Web for interacting with devices.
The “Web of Things” workshop solicits contributions in all areas related to the Web of Things, and we invite application designers to think beyond sensor networks and Web applications, and to imagine, design, build, evaluate, and share their thoughts and visions on what the future of the Web and networked devices will be. The workshop aims at exploring the use of principles and technologies at the core of the Web such as Representational State Transfer (REST), syndication (e.g., Atom), and real-time Web technologies (e.g., HTML5 Web Sockets) for providing access to pervasive and ubiquitous computing services and also solicits contributions related to the Web-based composition of things and physical mashups.
Topics:
- Discovery and look-up for things and their services on the Web
- Web-based things composition and physical mashups
- Real-time communication with physical objects (e.g., syndication, streaming, instant messaging, Web push)
- Human-things interaction models and paradigms
- Security, access control, and sharing of physical things on the Web
- Application of Web tools and techniques for the physical world (e.g., REST, HTML5, caching, cloud services, social networks)
- Applications of the Web of Things (smart homes/cities/factories)
- Deployments and evaluations of Web of things systems
- Business opportunities for the Web of Things
The third edition of the Web of Things workshop series will provide an interactive forum for WoT researchers to learn and discuss about existing efforts with respect to the Web-based interaction of smart things. In order to ensure a high-quality technical session, submissions must cover one of the topics above and should not exceed six (6) ACM SIG Proceedings Template pages. Research papers must be original prior unpublished work and not under review elsewhere as they will be published to the ACM digital library and listed on DBLP. All submissions will be peer-reviewed and selected based on their originality, merit, and relevance to the workshop. Submission requires at least one author to present the paper on-site. For instructions on how to submit to WoT 2012, visit http://www.webofthings.org/wot/2012/submission.php.
Organizers:
Simon Mayer, ETH Zurich, Switzerland,
Dominique Guinard, Evrythng Ltd., UK,
Erik Wilde, EMC Corp., USA,
Program Committee:
Rosa Alarcon, Pontificia Universidad Catalica de Chile, Chile
Benoit Christophe, Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs, France
Christian Floerkemeier, Auto-ID Labs, MIT, USA
Artem Katasonov, VTT Labs, Finland
Gerd Kortuem, Lancaster University, UK
Matthias Kovatsch, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Marc Langheinrich, Universita della Svizzera Italiana (USI), Switzerland
Rodger Lea, University of British Columbia, Canada
Olivier Liechti, University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland, Switzerland
Marino Linaje, Universidad de Extremadura, Spain
Diego Lopez de Ipina, Universidad de Deusto, Spain
Friedemann Mattern, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Florian Michahelles, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Guido Moritz, Universitaet Rostock, Germany
Claro Noda, Universidade do Minho, Portugal
Jacques Pasquier, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Dave Raggett, W3C
David Resseguie, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA
Till Riedel, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Andreas Ruppen, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Vlad Stirbu, Nokia, Finland
Vlad Trifa, Evrythng Ltd., UK
Inaki Vazquez, Symplio, Spain
Hi (research)-folks,
Extending Seamlessly to the Internet of Things (esIoT) is an international workshop focused on the integration aspects of the Internet of Things (IoT), we just got the CFP and a couple of our friends are in the PC so you might want to consider submitting something there (of course after submitting to WoT 2012 )
Scope
ICTs evolution has led to wireless personal devices such as smart phones, personal computers and PDAs. These devices have in common that they are designed to operate over IP Networks. Hence, the number of devices that are connected to the Internet is growing exponentially. This has led to define a new concept of Internet, the commonly called Future Internet and Internet of Things (IoT).
The objective of IoT is the integration and unification of all communication systems located surrounds us. Thereby, the systems can get control and total access of the other systems for leading to provide ubiquitous communication and computing with the purpose of defining a new generation of services.
Extending Seamlessly to the Internet of Things (esIoT) is an international workshop focused on the integration aspects of the Internet of Things (IoT). The emerging machine-to-machine (M2M) systems should provide transparent access to information and services through a seamless integration into the Internet. On the one hand, the so-called Web of Things aims for direct Web connectivity by pushing its technology down to devices. On the other hand, cost and energy requirements of embedded devices demand efficient protocols and communication patterns, which affect the application layer. This workshop provides a forum to elaborate on ideas and approaches to adapt, extend, or bridge the existing IoT building blocks, such as ETSI M2M, ZigBee, IPv6/6LoWPAN, RFID, and legacy networked embedded systems. In addition, the impact of the IoT on industry, business, and society, including security and privacy requirements, will be discussed.
Tracks & Topics:
Extending things to Internet through IPv6
Architectures and Middlewares for Internet of Things integration
Global connectivity
End to End / Machine to Machine (M2M) protocols
Protocols for smart things: 6LoWPAN / DASH7 / ZigBee IP
Mobility management
Cloud computing and things internetworking
Standardization and regulatory issues
Web of Things
Lightweight RestFul / CoAP / Lightweight SOAP
Lightweight data structured (EXI)
Resource Directory approaches
Semantic description of things and services
New patterns to communicate with things Blockwise, Observe etc…
Security, trust and Privacy
Lightweight implementations of cryptographic stacks
End to end security capabilities from the things
Security for CoAP and ZigBee IP (DTLS, TLS etc..)
Bootstrapping techniques (PANA, EAP, HIP DEX …)
RFID and end-devices Identification
EPC to IPv6 approaches, and ONS and EPCIS for things
NFC integration in the Internet of Things
Human-device interactions based on RFID/NFC
Protocols and algorithms for the massive identification of things
Naming, address management and addressability issues
Performance modeling and network technologies
Performance analysis (QoS, scalability, reliability, etc.)
Channel and traffic models
Routing protocols for the Internet of Things (RPL…)
Sustainable design and technologies (e.g. energy-efficiency)
Use Cases and Applications
Mobile applications (Android OS, iOS, Windows mobile, etc.)
Real-time data management / Critical Environments
Smart cities / Home Automation / Building Automation
Industrial solutions
Business models
Test-beds and field trial
Special Track: AAL and e-Health (with a special issue for these papers)
AAL and e-Health applications and solutions
Medical communications, protocols and standards
NFC and RFID in healthcare
Living labs and field trials
When Massimiliano Ventimiglia (aka. Max, from H-art), first asked me to give a keynote at the BTO (Buy Tourism Online) 2011 conference, I was rather puzzled: what can the Web of Things bring to tourism? What innovation can we fuel in this rather distant field?
Well, after several brainstorming sessions with the crew at Evrythng, we had so many application ideas that I had to filter most of them in order not to overload the talk!
Not convinced? Well then make sure you watch the video below (I’m starting, in English, at 5:58:00 but if you understand Italian make sure to listen to the other talks in the session!):
or at least have a look at the slides:
Any other ideas of how we could contribute to Tourism 3.0? Let us know below
A while ago, in an interview for Postscapes I was talking about a start-up, good friend of ours and spin-off of our research group at ETH which was building plant monitoring sensors. I had the chance to test them and was rather amazed by this practical, truly Web of Things type of project. They are just about to ramp-up production of their first hardware product – a WiFi Plant Sensor. Internal sources told me it’ll be launched in Spring 2012 but we’ll keep you updated on this one.
Meanwhile, the guys are currently launching a Web version of their plant monitoring iPhone App. It’s currently in private beta, but we have invites for 50 Web of Things readers. Just visit my.koubachi.com and enter the code WOT2011. So WoTters and plant lovers, make sure to check it out!
To get a taste of it, check the video of the neat iPhone app below (@Koubachi: How about an Android version? Pleazzze!)
As the eternal second (although my thesis was finished first ;-P), I’m following Vlad’s great idea to make the final version of my thesis available to you, WoTters!
Vlad and I were always pretty complementary in building our shared vision of the Web of Things. As such, my thesis is focusing more on the “software engineering” aspects of the Web of Things. I’d like to see it as a cookbook for implementing the Web of Things in such a way that for every cross-cutting concern, there is a Web recipe!
The architecture (see figure below) proposes Web solutions to 4 of these concerns: accessibility, findability, sharing and composition. It also introduces the Social Web of Things (where things use social networks) and the notion of Physical Mashups (where things can be used easily in 2.0 Web mashups).
The Web of Things Application Architecture
Here is a short version of the abstract:
[…] The Internet is a compelling example of a scalable global network of computers that interoperate across heterogeneous hardware and software platforms. On top of the Internet, the Web illustrates well how a set of relatively simple and open standards can be used to build very flexible systems while preserving efficiency and scalability. The cross-integration and developments of composite applications on the Web, alongside with its ubiquitous availability across a broad range of devices (e.g., desktops, laptops, mobile phones, set-top boxes, gaming devices, etc.), make the Web an outstanding candidate for a universal integration platform. Web sites do not offer only pages anymore, but Application Programming Interfaces that can be used by other Web resources to create new, ad-hoc and composite applications running in the computing cloud and being accessed by desktops or mobile computers.
In this thesis we use the Web and its emerging technologies as the basis of a smart things application integration platform. In particular, we propose a Web of Things application architecture offering four layers that simplify the development of applications involving smart things. First, we address device accessibility and propose implementing, on smart things, the architectural principles that are at the heart of the Web such the Representational State Transfer (REST). We extend the REST architecture by proposing and implementing a number of improvements to fit the special requirements of the physical world such as the need for domain-specific proxies or real-time communication.
In the second layer we study findability: In a Web populated by billions of smart things, how can we identify the devices we can interact with, the devices that provide the right service for our application? To address these issues we propose a lightweight metadata format that search engines can understand, together with a Web-oriented discovery and lookup infrastructure that leverages the particular context of smart things.
While the Web of Things fosters a rather open network of physical objects, it is very unlikely that in the future access to smart things will be open to anyone. In the third layer we propose a sharing infrastructure that leverages social graphs encapsulated by social networks. We demonstrate how this helps sharing smart things in a straightforward, user-friendly and personal manner, building a Social Web of Things.
Our primary goal in bringing smart things to the Web is to facilitate their integration into composite applications. Just as Web developers and tech-savvies create Web 2.0 mashups (i.e., lightweight, ad-hoc compositions of several services on the Web), they should be able to create applications involving smart things with similar ease. Thus, in the composition layer we introduce the physical mashups and propose a software platform, built as an extension of an open-source workflow engine, that offers basic constructs which can be used to build mashup editors for the Web of Things.
Finally, to test our architecture and the proposed tools, we apply them to two types of smart things. First we look at wireless sensor networks, in particular at energy and environmental monitoring sensor nodes. Then, to better understand and evaluate how the Web of Things architecture can facilitate the development of real-world aware business applications, we study automatic identification [...]
Put together, these contributions materialize into an ecosystem of building-blocks for the Web of Things: a world-wide and interoperable network of smart things on which applications can be easily built, one step closer to bridging the gap between the virtual and physical worlds.
Download the thesis! (PDF, 245 pages, 24MB)
Get the citation key! (Bibtex)
or… have a look at the final presentation:
Folks, I (Dom as well) *finally* submitted the final version of my PhD thesis last friday to ETH Zurich, so I can now be officially called Dr. Vlad Trifa. You can download the final version here (16MB, 190 pages). Feedback is welcome, typos less (freshly submitted so give a little time to worry less!
Here’s an excerpt from the abstract:
Our research bridges the fields of Web technologies and embedded sensing into a unified vision called the \emph{Web of Things} — where the Web’s well-known standards and tools are leveraged to seamlessly blend NEDs (Networked Embedded Devices) with the existing Web infrastructure. By drawing upon tools and techniques from both domains, we define the fundamental building blocks of the Web of Things as an extension of the current Web paradigms. After evaluating the limitations of current Web technologies with respect to the requirements of NED applications, we propose practical solutions to alleviate these difficulties to enable the development of efficient, event-driven, and scalable DSAs (Distributed Sensing Applications). Finally, we propose an end-to-end, fully Web-based framework that fosters fast prototyping of distributed sensing applications that run on top of heterogeneous NEDs.
In contrast to existing research in sensor networks, the central question explored in this thesis is how much of the existing Web infrastructure can be reused to accommodate embedded devices. We further examine the common belief that Web standards are inappropriate for building efficient DSAs. Experimental results and prototypes are provided to support the hypothesis that using Web standards for NEDs is possible. Our results further show that the Web is not only a suitable, but actually a desirable medium to build distributed sensing applications that match the requirements for future large-scale sensing systems.
We provide a comprehensive — conceptual and empirical — investigation of the usage of Web standards to exchange information with embedded devices, and the contributions of our work are multiple. First, our results are relevant to the sensor network and pervasive computing communities, as they support the hypothesis that the existing Web ecosystem is sufficient \textit{as is} to build a new generation of scalable and flexible participatory applications on top of heterogeneous NEDs. Second, the Web community at large can build upon our set of guidelines to push the Web into the physical world by integrating devices in the Web fabric, thus making the idea of a Web API for the real world realistic. Third, we explore the practical usage of Web technologies in various contexts, from smart spaces to smart cities, and show that a fully Web-based infrastructure is an excellent basis to build an ecosystem of reconfigurable cyber-physical systems. Finally, we hope the work presented here will serve as inspiration for future Web developers and sensor network researchers. Bridging the gap between these two worlds will very likely shed light upon an unexplored design space to create more potent solutions for important societal problems, from energy-efficient buildings, to catastrophe detection and response systems, to more livable and enjoyable cities.
And here are the slides that I used for my final defense:
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions, remarks, etc. Looking forward to your feedback!
Update: There is a pretty relevant discussion about that going on in the Web of Things LinkedIn group, make sure your check it out!
Yes, the news came out a few days ago through the New York Times:
At Google X, where he is working on the Web of things, according to people familiar with his role, he has the mysterious title of rapid evaluator
So Google might well be working on the Web of Things. We, we kind of guessed already, through project like the Android at Home (which is you ask me is definitely missing the “Web” of “Web of Things”). However, I’m asking you, fellow WoTers, should we fear it or like it? How much of it is “land-grabbing” and how much is actual work-in-progress?
I’m willing to like it because it will generate a lot of attention to our field, but to fear it as well as their announcements might kill many startups in the egg based on bulldozer-type of marketing and the “if google does it we can’t be as good” syndrome (because, yes they are good!). You want an example: look at the Power Meter story, which was discontinued a little while ago after de-motivating a number of startups and researchers. We were amongst them as this announcement made us definitely give up the commercialisation of the Energy Visible project, wrongfully?
I’m telling you, WoTers from all over the world, let’s show them what WoT researchers and WoT startups can achieve. After all, we, WoTers are years of research ahead of them, aren’t we? What’s your take on it?
At last a slightly geeky post ! A few days ago I was at Google Zurich (GTUG) to present a more technical remix of a talk I originally gave at Jazoon 2011.
In a nutshell, the talk was about how HTML5 WebSockets would soon be ready for pushing data to mobile phones in a standard way (and possibly soon to/from any embedded device?). In a Web of Things context, we used this at the MIT Auto-ID labs to push data “directly” from RFID readers to Android or iOS mobile phones within a few lines of Javascript code (for the client) and 20 lines of Java code (for the server).
In this talk I focused on showing the elegance of using WebSockets for Web of Things applications. Indeed, thanks to the very simple Javascript client library, a WebSocket client is summed up as follow:
var myWebSocket = new WebSocket("ws://URL");
myWebSocket.onopen = function(evt) {
alert("Connection open ..."); };
myWebSocket.onmessage = function(evt) {
alert( "Received Message: " + evt.data); };
myWebSocket.onclose = function(evt) {
alert("Connection closed."); };myWebSocket.send("Hello Web Sockets!");
myWebSocket.close();
Hard to make it simpler, right? However, the current reality is slightly different. Indeed, as the standard is still evolving, browsers and application/web servers support WebSockets in very different flavours (or just don’t!). Hence, in this talk I was also discussing the use of abstraction frameworks and in particular the impressive Atmosphere framework that deal for you with the current heterogeneous WebSocket support.
However, rather than a lengthy description here, I invite you to watch the talk which was recorded by the great Zurich GTUG crew, enjoy (sorry for the bad-jokes, it was a relaxed event ):
Due to popular demand (I wish 
) I also posted the sources here.
And the slides are still available on slideshare.
A side effect of running the Web of Things blog is to get a daily number of “request for articles” (i.e., requests for free advertisement on your blog of my product). Most of them are totally completely and entirely unrelated to the Web of Things (and Vlad has a pretty interesting standard reply-mail for these ;-P) but once in a while you get a little pearl that is definitely worth talking about. We got two of those lately: one being rather serious, the other being awesomely delicious! Let me share the latter with you today and keep the other for later on.
When Johannes Schoening (a good research friend of mine) first mailed me about the project, I had to laugh for half an hour (before starting to wonder what kind of drugs he was on). But then he sent me a package, containing a sample of his invention: the first, Web-connected (ok, through a proxy but still) …. cookies! The idea is so simple, but just so nice: a box, full of ingredients for cooking cookies and containing some eatable QRCodes. These standard codes are resolved to a URL than can then be redirected to any online content through the QKies Website (German only, sorry about that!). Can you think of any better way to invite your friends to your next party or of announcing some happy event to your best (geeky) friends?
QKies – sag’s mit Keksen from r3 media on Vimeo.
Besides being a neat little product there is also one important thing we can learn from it: simplicity is the way to go forward to slowly but steadily bring the Web of Things to the masses! Big up Johannes
