Web of Things 2010 Workshop

we were just informed that our Web of Things 2010 proposal at the Eighth Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications has been accepted, which means that there will be a WoT2010 workshop at PerCom 2010 in march 2010. this is great news for us, and i am looking forward to organizing this workshop with dominique guinard and vlad trifa from ETH zurich’s distributed systems group.

from my point of view, this workshop nicely complements the Location and the Web (LocWeb) workshops organized in 2008 and 2009. however, i guess we will face the exact same challenges: my vision for the LocWeb workshops was to not focus on location-enabled application that happen to have a web interface, but to really focus on the larger, systemic issues of location on the web; to look at what it takes to location-enable the web, and thus to look beyond single applications. this did not work as well as i hoped, we still had a lot of submissions about location-enabled applications on the web, but that was also good, because it provided a nice forum for presenting various approaches of how to use and expose location on the web.

for WoT, the challenge will be the same: the goal is to mainly attract submissions that look beyond the single application, and that look at systemic issues of making the web a better place for things. my guess is that we again will get the majority of submissions about projects that deal with real-world things, and somehow expose these on the web. and again, it will not be a problem, because that will allow us to provide a nice overview of the current landscape of these applications.

since i am currently at ICWE 2009, i couldn’t help but notice the similarity to what’s going on here: even though it’s called Web Engineering, the majority of the conference is actually about Web Application Engineering, or more specifically Model-Driven Web Application Engineering. but even though this is more about engineering for the web (or even software engineering for the web) and not as much about engineering the web as i would lke it to be, it still is a great forum to see the ongoing developments in how apps for the web can be created. and regardless of personal preferences, the thing that matters most is that there are forums where people can meet and discuss the future of the web, and not only that of web apps.