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

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!

Here, we go: Vlad and I both defended our PhDs a few days, respectively weeks ago. We will certainly soon share the content of our respective written thesis (we currently look into making a book out of the two, any interested publisher out there?) but meanwhile I wanted to share the content of my final presentation (aka PhD defense).

My focus was very much on thinking about the building-blocks (or layers) required to gradually ease the development of Internet of Things applications thanks to Web (inspired) protocols, techniques and tools. The underlying question being:

How can the Web be leveraged to ease the development of Internet of Things applications and bring it closer to non-specialists?

In a nutshell, I looked at four “layers” of integration: accessibility (REST, Smart Gateways, IP for devices), findability (lightweight semantics, microformats, Google of things, local search infrastructure), sharing (social Web of Things, social networks, delegated authentication for things, etc.) and composition (physical mashups, Web composition engine, real-world composite applications, etc.). I then applied these layers to two domains: Wireless Sensor Networks and Global RFID deployments (EPC Network). The more technically inclined of yours might want to know that these layers are not strictly stacked, OSI-types of layers, but rather composed of flexible building-blocks that can be used or not depending on your application requirements.

The presentation is a short summary of these layers, their implementations and evaluations. The first 30 slides is the content that was actually presented during the defense, the rest of the slides are backups that go slightly more in depth on various building-blocks.

Enjoy, feedback is always very welcomed and, as said, stay tuned here for the written thesis.

Part 1: Cloud & REST | Part 2: HTML5 WebSockets | Part 3: Physical Mashups

A few weeks ago, I started posting a series about the project we were working on while at MIT: applying the Web of Things patterns and blueprints to the RFID global network (EPC Network). Better late than never, here is the last part of the posts series: Physical Mashups.

Physical Mashups are applications unifying the Web of today and tomorrow’s Web of Things. Tech-savvies, i.e., end-users at ease with new technologies, can create Physical Mashups by composing virtual and physical services. Following the trend of Web 2.0 participatory services and in particular Web mashups, users can create applications mixing real-world devices such as home appliances or sensors with virtual services on the Web.

Thanks to the deployment of the EPC software stack in the cloud and the implementation of a RESTful architecture for RFID, we can now implement Physical Mashup editors for enabling users to flexibly model use-cases of RFID infrastructures. Let us think for instance of an Electronic Article Surveillance system (aka EAS). For this use-case, we design new mashup building-blocks:

These modules were implemented as building-blocks a modified version of the nice Clickscript mashup editor. Reducing interfaces of the EPC Network to Web interfaces enables each building block to be implemented with a small amount of JavaScript code. Using these building-blocks and other basic blocks, we can implement several EAS use-cases within a few clicks. As shown in the figure below, the building-blocks of the RFID mashup editor communicate with several components of the EPC Cloud Infrastructure. First, the RFID-reader block subscribes to the t-pusher HTML5 WebSockets push service using a particular reader ID (e.g., exit-gate). As a consequence, it gets pushed all the RFID events for this reader. The EPCIS block is then used to check whether the pushed RFID number (i.e., EPCs) represent goods that were already sold. To check this, the block uses a RESTful HTTP request on our open-source EPCIS Webadapter.

If it is the case, nothing happens. If it isn’t the case (i.e., the goods were stolen), the Video Camera block is triggered. This components represents a Webcam that can be used to take snapshots through a RESTful API. The URI of the snapshot is then sent to all subscribers of a particular topic (i.e., URI) through t-Pusher. As an example we developed a small mobile Web application with Sencha Touch which subscribes to the topic and loads the corresponding image alongside with the EPC number of the stolen good (see mobile phone in the figure below). Such an application can be used to push information about the theft to all staff members in a store.

Once a mashup has been successfully created and tested locally with Clickscript, it can be exported to our Physical Mashup Engine where is it going to be deployed remotely executed. This illustrates well the benefits of transforming every standard in the EPC Network to offer RESTful Web APIs: development is streamlined to Web development and cross-integration with existing services on the Web (e.g., social networks, visualization tools, could infrastructures, mashups) becomes very straightforward.

The full use-case was tested in a lab deployment at the MIT Auto-ID Labs featuring a standard gate (LLRP) RFID reader and an off-the-shelf Webcam as shown in the figure below. The average observed RTT (round trip time: from the reader, to the Amazon Cloud instance, through the mashup engine and finally to the mobile Web application) was around 1 second. However, it is worth noting that this RTT stronlgy depends on factors such as the available connection bandwidth, the type of instances used on Amazon EC2, the current load of the cloud appliance, etc. Since these factors cannot all be controlled this is a real challenge for IoT / WoT applications in the cloud and we are eager to hear about your real-world experiences in the comments!

For more details about the project, have a look at the published paper or the slides below:

A few days ago, this call for paper was brought to my attention (thanks to Marino Linaje). It has two interesting aspects:
1) It is quite close to the CFP of WoT, the International Workshop on the Web of Things.
2) It was initiated by people from the service/Web communities which shows the increasing interest in the topic on the Web-side of Things (WoT was slightly more on the Things-side of Things, i.e., ubiquitous/pervasive computing).

Reading such CFPs makes me feel like at some point we should merge these workshops (WoT, ATI, Touch the Web) and create a Web of Things conference all together… what would you, WoT researchers think of that?

For now, let’s publish the ATI cfp:

Ambient Things on the Internet – ATI 2011

A workshop to be held in conjunction with Web Information System Engineering (WISE 2011)
October 13th – 14th 2011, Sydney, Australia

Abstract:
Advances in RFID, ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, sensor technology, and similar standards are competing to connect the physical world with the virtual world, via. the Internet. Various alliances like the IPSO (Internet Protocol for Smart Objects) and the FIA (Future Internet Assembly) are promoting the Internet of Things (IoT) as the next advancement of the Internet. While the Internet is poised to lay the foundation for connecting all things, the Web is mutating to provide services for the physical world, giving birth to Web of Things (WoT). The WoT is the platform on which applications are built for accessing and harnessing the vast amount of inherent information that is prevalent in things around us. The ongoing integration of physical and virtual worlds, creating ambient environments, poses many opportunities as well as challenges. New applications and services, bridging the virtual and physical worlds, have already emerged in various domains like business, healthcare, and infrastructure. These new developments however, raise many research questions: interaction, security, collaboration, context, discovery and privacy of physical things in the virtual world. These and many more are yet to be fully addressed.

This workshop aims at gathering researchers from the field of Internet applications and Web based Infrastructure to discuss new opportunities and hurdles to leverage the possibilities of Web applications and services accessing the physical world. We intend to discuss the recent developments and target researchers from academia and industry to join hands in this emerging research area. The workshop will lead to identifying new directions and setting the scope of developments in this area. The participants will be enlightened with intellectual discussions, highlighting the advances in technology that bridges the physical world and the digital world. The “Ambient Things on the Internet (ATI)” workshop solicits contributions in line with this vision that are original, unpublished and not currently under review by another conference or journal. We invite researchers, application developers and designers to share their ideas and visions on what the future of the Web and networked things will be.

Specific topics include (but not limited to):
• Infrastructure of Ambient environments
• Communication systems and architectures for the Internet of Things
• Web composition of physical things
• Innovative applications for the Web of Things
• Robustness of environment management with the Internet of Things
• Future technologies bridging the physical and virtual worlds
• Business models and processes for the Internet of Things
• Impacts on the security, privacy and risks on the physical world
• Applications and interaction for social networking of physical things
• Location and discovery of things on the Internet
• Smart objects
• Case studies in areas of Education, Healthcare, Agriculture, Logistics and Transport

Web Sites:
ATI 2011
WISE 2011

Important Dates:
Abstract submission: Aug 21st, 2011
Paper submission: Aug 26th, 2011
Notification of acceptance/rejection: Sep 20th, 2011
Submission of camera-ready papers: Oct 7th, 2011

Dear all,
In the middle of our thesis-writing, we gave an interview on the Web of Things to the american Discover magazine for a special issue on the invisible earth. The interview just got published and I wanted to share some thoughts about it with you.

Actually it was a really fun interview and came out as a really fun article. No rocket science but a funny, critical and futuristic look at the Internet of Things and the evolution towards the Web of Things. Beyond the fact that David H. Freedman (the author) definitely masters the art of vulgarization, he was asking me a tricky question about half-way in the interview:

What are the killer apps of the Internet/Web of Things?

A simple and not exactly rare question, so I came up with a number of traditional answers taken from our previous work and prototypes such as: drastically simplifying home automation and expending the cross-devices possibilities, making end-user things programming a reality, allowing (real-time) and tracking of every goods on the planet, making cities/transportation/agriculture smarter, linking objects and people through social networks, finding your keys anywhere in the world, etc, etc.

I also gave him a number of links to great startups in the field and briefly described some of their products: Evrythng, IoBridge, ThingWorx, Sen.se, Koubachi, Mirasense, OpenPicus, the Sun Spot crew, etc, etc, etc!

No way! He was still not finding a true killer app in those. My take is that although the world is almost ready for the Web of Things, we (as a community) still have to get a bit more down to earth, thinking beyond platforms about very simple use-cases that we can implement today already and that people can relate to.
Suggestions anyone? Let’s kick off the discussion!

Enjoy the article online as well:

	Read the article online >
The Internet and the Web of Things

As Google recently announced their plans to move in the home automation world with Android at home (and we are still wondering why they waited so long to do it), I thought I would share my view on that. I do believe there are many opportunities ahead for the “home operating system” domain. The combination of cheap, yet powerful networked digital appliances in the house (NAS, networked media players, WiFi routers, etc) along with an extensible application framework, and a market place for buying new applications (or installing drivers, etc) – will be a killer combo for home automation to take off, especially for building management systems (I’m not yet convinced the market is ready for consumer home automation – unless you’re millionaire and want to show off by turning off lights by clapping hands). But I do believe the Web of Things in this vision can be a solid innovation enabler by making it easy to integrate all kinds of devices and develop new home automation mashlets (mashup & applets – does this even exist? or should we call these phy-ma-les = PHYsical MAshup appLEtS? no? ok…. fine…).

But for this to happen, “we need a hub to receive all the sensors” according to a recent blog post. I disagree. We don’t need one hub, we need many hubs. But even more so, we need the ability to establish direct connectivity between anything electronic and applications. Exactly in the same way as one can search and download specific stuff from particular users that have it in a p2p network.

We have been exploring the field of home automation since the early days of WoT, and we have prototyped several versions of a fully web-based “smart home gateways” that allows the integration of heterogeneous embedded devices into high-level interactive, mobile, and event-driven Web applications. Our first iteration was built with Samuel Wieland [4,5] project, and then superseded by Aparat [3,6], done by another former student Vlatko Davidovski with whom we designed a modular framework (based on OSGi) to easily create applications, develop new devices drivers, that supported Web-based messaging (both pubsubhubbub and Comet), microformat-based resource and device discovery over HTTP, among other features. With another student (Andreas Kamilaris) we have designed in 2009 HomeWeb, a Web-based framework for integrating sensor networks on the Web and afterwards extended it to the home automation domain [1]. We also recently published a journal paper on this work as well [2].

As we’re nearing to IPv6 (dooms)day (actually passed it), more and more routers and networks will be switching (or at least supporting) it, and this will pave the way to better adoption and ripening of the market for Wi-Fi and other IP-enabled consumer electronics. On top of this ecosystem of interconnected devices, a Web-based framework that facilitates development and distribution of applications will clearly unlock the potentials and an open market that drive us away from the currently dictatorial and closed solutions in this domain. At least this is what we hope for.

Clearly, the biggest challenge ahead (and one that I keep seeing only marginally addressed in our research field so far) is security, authentication, and devices sharing. If your whole house is connected to the Web, there are major risks involved as virtually one could entirely control your house (turn off security systems), spy by monitoring all your movements (or hot summer nights via surveillance cameras), or do even more critical things such as lock elevators, close doors, and so on.

The security issue leads us to the following question as to what would be best? An open source security solution that everyone knows and can improve upon by eliminate bugs (thousands pair of eyes are better than a few), with the risk that any hacker can find out exactly how the whole system works? Or a black-box proprietary closed-source system that is hard to analyze and crack, which might be in fact more bugged? Also, how one can combine various modalities for securing that you are really “you” and you are at your home (RFID can hacked, mobile phones can be lost, pin codes can be transmitted). Also, what will be the role of biometric ID solutions (retina scanners, etc)? As long as authentication data is sent by an application over the network, then it can be forged with another “software emulation”, how this could be prevented?

We would love to have your opinion on these questions and feel free to join our discussion in the comments (or on our LinkedIn or facebook pages). We’d really appreciate if you would share with us projects and services that you think can solve this issue.

1. Andreas Kamilaris, Vlad Trifa and Adreas Pitsillides. The Smart Home Meets the Web of Things. Int. J. of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 7(3), 2011. [pdf]
2. Andreas Kamilaris, Vlad Trifa and Andreas Pitsillides. HomeWeb: An Application Framework for Web-based Smart Homes. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Telecommunications, Ayia Napa, Cyprus, May 2011. [pdf]
3. Vlatko Davidovski (M.Sc. thesis at ETH Zurich). A Web-oriented Infrastructure for Interacting with Digitally Augmented Environments.
4. Samuel Wieland (M.Sc. thesis at ETH Zurich). Design and Implementation of a Gateway for Web-based Interaction and Management of Embedded Devices.
5. Vlad Trifa, Samuel Wieland, Dominique Guinard and Thomas Michael Bohnert. Design and Implementation of a Gateway for Web-based Interaction and Management of Embedded Devices. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Sensor Network Engineering (IWSNE’09), Marina del Rey, CA, USA, June 2009. [pdf]
6. Vlad Trifa, Dominique Guinard, Vlatko Davidovski, Andreas Kamilaris and Ivan Delchev. Web Messaging for Open and Scalable Distributed Sensing Applications. In Proc. of the 10th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2010), Vienna, Austria, June 2010. [pdf]

In a little more than a week (12.06.2011) we will kick-start the second international workshop on the Web of Things (WoT 2011).

2011 is the year of many WoT realizations and this is reflected in the, we believe, rather thrilling program of WoT 2011. Here is a brief preview of WoT is to expect

Morning: after a short welcome introduction we will deep into real world architectures with three papers discussing how smart things can actually be Web-enabled and what are the architectures and technologies that make it possible.

We will then discuss the Social Web of Things as well as the Semantic Web of Things with three papers illustrating how things are blending with the social graph and leveraging the semantic Web.

Afternoon: after a nice lunch, full of HTTP requests here and there, we will be discussing actual deployments of the WoT as well as its concrete applications. Four papers will be presented, ranging from how business processes can leverage the WoT, cloud computing and REST to how users can be put at the very center of the Web of Things.

Finally, we will have a great and open demo session where the participants will be invited to demonstrate concrete and working (well half-working is ok as well) WoT prototypes.

The fact that this year is the year of WoT realizations is also reflected by the fact that a number of companies, developing, deploying and selling WoT technologies will be present.
Hans Scharler from ioBridge will present their rather impressive Thingspeak platform. ThingWorx will present their professional platform for connecting the real-world devices to business applications.

This teaser would not be complete without showcasing the hackaton that we organize before the workshop (11.06.2011) where we expect lots of creative participants to build innovative apps on top of Web of Things prototypes and products like the Sun Spots (thanks to Oracle for providing them!) and the disruptive Sen.se platform.

Can’t wait to be there!

Full program of the Web of Things Workshop (WoT 2011) available here! and description of the hackaton here!

As Dom recently mentioned, we are not abandoning WoT, on the contrary, we are currently planning our next move after our graduation in the next few months (most likely in the entrepreneurial world, so if you have plans/offers/funding/ideas, we’re all ears and evaluating how we can best leverage our WoT know how). But until then, we’re both just damn busy writing our dissertation and preparing WoT 2011 workshop

Part 1: Cloud & REST | Part 2: HTML5 WebSockets | Part 3: Physical Mashups

In a recent post, we were explaining how in a project common to MIT and ETH Zurich, we simplified deployments of IoT applications based on the EPC Global standards.

We operated this simplification by applying four of the Web of Things patterns: Cloud Computing, RESTful Interface, Real-Time Web and Physical Mashups.

In the first related post we described how we used Cloud Computing and RESTful Interfaces. It is now time to talk a little bit more about one of the other pattern: the Real-Time Web.

Real-Time Web: HTML 5 WebSockets to Enable Near Real-Time Applications

Early on, experts of the RFID domain asked us to enable mobile or Web clients access to the raw data directly pushed by RFID readers. The challenge here is that the Web was designed mainly as a client-pull architecture, where clients can explicitly request (pull) data and receive it as a response (we have a paper about the matter, here!). This makes uses-cases where near real-time communication is required rather challenging. As an example, a typical use-case is one in which we would like to push events that are being recorded by an RFID reader directly to a mobile browser application for monitoring purpose.

Here, the “Real-time Web”, one of the most recent blueprints of the Web, can be leveraged. The Real Time Web encompasses several new techniques that can be used to push events directly to browsers. We focus on two of these here. The first one, called Comet (also called HTTP streaming or long-polling) is based on the concept of long-lasting HTTP connections and keep-alive messages. While this is supported by most browsers and HTTP libraries, it works by using an existing loop-hole. More recently, Websockets (part of the HTML5 drafts) were proposed. Websockets propose duplex communication with a single TCP/IP connection directly accessible from any compliant browser through a simple Javascript API. The increasing support for HTML5 in Web and Mobile Web browsers makes it a very good candidate for pushing data on the Web.

For the EPC Network, we created tPusher, a service that combines a RESTful API with a Web-socket and Comet server. Using
a RESTful API, clients can subscribe to RFID event notifications for a particular reader by using a URL such as:

http://.../t-pusher/reader/READER_ID

This initiates a Websocket connection with the server on which RFID events recorded by READER_ID will be pushed.

Our implementation is based on the great Atmosphere framework. Atomosphere is a Java abstraction framework for enabling push support on most Java Web servers. One of the advantages of this approach is to be able to deploy tPusher on recent Web Servers such as Grizzly, which are highly optimized to push events on the Web because of their usage of non-blocking threads for each client. In order to support browsers or other clients that do not support HTML5 Websockets yet, we use a client-side abstraction Javascript library called Atmosphere JQuery Plugin which falls back to a Comet connection in case Websockets are not supported by the client.

To better understand the impact of tPusher in the context of RFID apps let us talk about our demonstration: When setting up RFID readers or maintaining existing deployments it is valuable to have a direct feedback of the tags observed by a particular reader in order to monitor the manufacturing process or to debug the readers. In the current implementations of the EPC software stack this would require to use and configure a (expert) monitoring tool such as the Fosstrak LLRP Commander on a desktop computer. Thanks to the RESTful interface to the Real-Time Web capability of tPusher, the tags observed by any reader can now be directly pushed to any browser or HTTP library.

We developed as Mobile Web page that can display them in a user-friendly manner. The page uses HTML5, Javascript with the Atmosphere JQuery Plugin. All code required for such a page to subscribe to events pushed by readers through tPusher and display them fits within 5 lines of Javascript. The code is shown below:


// called whenever an event is pushed :
function callback(response )
{alert(response.responseBody + response.transport) ;}
// subscription to the events of reader "exit1 "
$.atmosphere.subscribe (
"http://EPC_CLOUD_APPLIANCE/t-pusher/reader/exit1" ,
callback , $.atmosphere.request =
{transport : ’ websocket ’ }) ;

Add some bits of Sencha Touch HTML and CSS and you get a nice, user friendly mobile Web application within a few hours of work. The app does not require any installation (just access a URL!) and works accross mobile Web browsers (e.g., iPhone Webkit, Android Webkit / Firefox mobile, etc.)
.

In a next post we will talk about the last pattern: Physical Mashups.

For those who can’t wait, you can already sneak into the presentation of the full project below.

Dear readers,

First of all let us apologize for the infrequent posts. We are both in “final PhD writing mode” which is a rather time-consuming activity right in a time where the Web of Things is getting a real hot topic!

Hence, only a small post to point you to a book. In an earlier post, we presented the Web of Things cookbook, which is in fact part of a book that just got published called: “Architecting the Internet of Things”.

The book is a nice surprise. It is not focused, like our chapter, on technical problems but rather gives an overview of where the Internet of Things comes from and where it might go in the (very?) near future. While we do not agree on everything in this book (but hey, mixes of perspectives usually lead to the right one! ) you should definitely browse it if you are an IoT / WoT researcher and especially if you need an easy to read overview of what researchers do in this field.

You can find it on Amazon or directly on Springer.

While heavily working on preparing a nice WoT 2011 workshop we wanted to share with you the call for paper of a “competing” workshop: Touch the Web.

I had the chance to attend it last year and I must say I was impressed by the quality of discussions. It was a rather small but very focused crowd, slightly more on the Web-side than on the things-side with a hint of model driven architectures (probably influenced by the mother conference it is attached to: ICWE), which makes it actually nicely complementary to WoT.

Anyways, I invite you all to look at the CFP and possibly attend it:

TouchTheWeb’11
International Workshop on Web-enabled Objects
ICWE 2011 – The Eleventh International Conference on Web Engineering.
Workshop Date: June 20, 2011

Workshop Organizers
Fernando Lyardet1, Dr. Vicente Pelechano2
1)Telecooperation Group
Darmstadt University of Technology
Hochschulstraße 10
64289 Darmstadt, Germany
fernando@tk.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de
2)Centro ProS – Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
Camino de Vera S/N,
46022 Valencia, España
pele@dsic.upv.es

Important Dates
April 26, 2011Submission Deadline
May. 26, 2011Notification of Acceptance
Jun. 10, 2011Final Papers Due

Aim and Scope
The vision of the Internet of Things builds upon the use of embedded systems to control devices, tools and appliances. Although this has been
common practice for almost two decades now, with every new generation, these controllers provide an ever-increasing list of capabilities in the
form of assistance, information, and customization. With the addition of novel communications capabilities and identification means such as RFID,
systems can now gather information from other sensors, devices and computers on the network, or enable user-oriented customization and
operations through short-range communication. So, what makes these connected things special? It is their ability to mesh the embedded
knowledge about themselves, and their capability to acquire, share and combine knowledge with other entities and services in their surroundings.
When the information gathered by different sensors is shared by means of open Web standards, new services can be defined on top of physical
elements. These meshes of things will become the basis upon which future smart living, working and production places will be created, that
gradually grow in complexity and smartness, as people define them with the objects they place. By interconnecting people and things through the
web, digital services can be directly provided where they are needed. This vision enables new ways of narrowing the differences between
virtual and physical worlds by defining a paradigm where both virtual and physical entities can seamlessly integrate their capabilities with
people.

The fundamental questions in this workshop are:
- How do we apply the lessons learned in Web Engineering to the Internet of Things?
- What kind of Web-based interaction patterns for embedded devices (streaming, eventing, etc.) can we identify?
- Applications, deployments, prototypes and evaluations of Web of things systems
- Human-things interaction models and paradigms (mobile interfaces, etc.)
- User-oriented, context-aware discovery and dynamic search for the real world
- Compositions of Things and Meshes of Things
- What kind of interfaces, business models and scenarios these smart
things will create, address and modify?
How can the services in the surroundings be composed and orchestrated?

The research areas involved are many, including Web Engineering,
Ubiquitous Computing, Product Engineering, Distributed Systems, Human
Computer Interaction, Economics, Artificial Intelligence, and many more.
We look forward in this workshop to bring together different areas of
expertise to help us shape a vision of creating living and working
surrounded by by meshes of web-enabled things.
We invite all researchers who want to contribute, to participate by
submitting an original paper of up to 10 pages and/or a position
statement of 2 pages (both Springer LNCS style). All submissions will be
blind reviewed by 2 members of the Program Committee.

The research areas involved are many, including Web Engineering, Ubiquitous Computing, Product Engineering, Distributed Systems, Human Computer Interaction, Economics, Artificial Intelligence, and many more. We look forward in this workshop to bring together different areas of expertise to help us shape a vision of creating living and working surrounded by by meshes of web-enabled things.

We invite all researchers who want to contribute, to participate by submitting an original paper of up to 10 pages and/or a position statement of 2 pages (both Springer LNCS style). All submissions will be blind reviewed by 2 members of the Program Committee.

Program Committee (In Formation)

Martin Gaedke, Technische Universität Chemnitz, Germany.
Pau Giner, Universidad de Valencia, Spain.
Dominique Guinard, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Tomás Sánchez López, Cambridge University, UK.
Diego López de Ipiña, Universidad de Deusto, Spain.
Kristof Van Laerhoven, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany.
Gustavo Rossi, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina.
Reiner Wichert, Fraunhofer IGD Darmstadt, Germany.

Part 1: Cloud & REST | Part 2: HTML5 WebSockets | Part 3: Physical Mashups

Since last summer, I had the chance to work at the MIT Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity (LMP) in the Auto-ID Labs sub-group, working with the lab associate director Christian Floerkemeier and Prof. Sanjay Sarma. Six month after the beginning of the project we reached a fist milestone and thought it would be good to wrap up what we did there.

The idea of the project is to study how Web and Web of Things blueprints (i.e., architectural patterns) can help to foster the adoption of the EPC Network by making it simpler to deploy and develop upon.

The EPC (Electronic Product Code) Network is probably one of the most comprehensively standardized IoT (Internet of Things) infrastructures: it offers standards that address every steps from encoding unique number on RFID tags, to reading them with standardized readers (LLRP), aggregating events (ALE) to persiting events in their business context and make them available for applications (EPCIS).

Recently, RFID is getting a second youth, its hype phase passed, it is now slowly coming to maturity in a number of applications. A lot of which combine RFID with other sensors and actuators. Not to forget the recent announcements of Google to boost the adoption of NFC (Near Field Communication, another type of RFID tags) by adding native Android OS support for NFC readers embedded in mobile phones (e.g., in the Nexus S).

However, while the adoption the hardware (EPC tags and LLRP readers) is progressing significantly, the adoption of the software standards is yet to take off especially for SMEs.

We believe that part of the reasons for this lack of adoption is the complexity of EPC Network infrastructures. As an example, the leading open-source implementation of the EPC software standards, Fosstrak, requires a total of 12 software components to be installed, configured and maintained. This was our starting point: what if Web and Web of Things architectural blueprints would make the EPC Network simpler to deploy, maintain and develop upon.

After looking a little more a the pain-points of EPC Network deployments we discovered that we could help on at least three of them with Web (of Things) remedies. We came up with 4 different remedies. In this post we look at two of them and will look at the others in a next post.

Cloud Computing and Virtualization to Reduce Installation, Configuration and Maintenance Costs/Hassle

We used virtualization (sometimes called Private Cloud) to create a development virtual machine, instead of hours of installation, the EPC dev virtual machine lets you test and develop with the EPC software stack within a few minutes.

We then used Cloud Computing (Utility Computing in a Public Cloud) to create an Amazon EC2 instance of a whole EPC back-end called EPC Cloud Appliance. Instead of weeks of installation by domain-experts, you now

1. buy an (LLRP) standard reader,
2. log onto Amazon EC2, select the EPC Cloud virtual machine fire it up on any number of appliances and off you go, you are ready to create your RFID applications, backed by a scalable, standard, EPC software infrastructure.

RESTful Interfaces to Simplify Application Development

Next, we wanted to simplify the currently rather complex interfaces to enable new types of apps using the EPC Network such as mobile apps, apps on sensor nodes or Web applications. The pattern we used for this is REST. Like in most Web of Things projects, we developed a RESTful architecture for the EPC Network in order to provide interfaces to RFID data and devices that are lightweight, easy to use, and easy to integrate with existing services on the Web.

Our first step in this space was to RESTify the information service of the EPC Network (the EPCIS) in a component called: EPCIS Webadapter as described here open-source software framework here. Using the Webadapter, every tagged product, reader, location, etc. gets a unique and resolvable URL.
Try it for yourself on live data by clicking the link below:
restepc.webofthings.com/location/urn:ch:sap:regensdorf:frc/reader/urn:ch:sap:regensdorf:frc:shopfloor/time/2010-12-28T12:23:28.000Z/event

With this interface, RFID data can be consumed by any Web client such as browsers, mobile phones, sensor nodes, etc.

In part 2 of this post we talk about how we used the Real-Time Web and Physical Mashups blueprints to further help easy Web development on top of the EPC Network.

You can also sneak into the presentation of the full project below.

The transcript of my talk at LIFT this afternoon. Thought it would be a good intro to WoT (although very high level), so I shared it here. Thoughts & feedback more than welcome! Yeah, it’s a lot of text, and it’s ugly to read on a blog, so I also made a pretty PDF you can print or read later.

(via alchemy1best on flickr)

[update] Also, see the talk here:

As a PhD student at ETH Zurich and SAP, I have been exploring the Internet of Things (IoT), which is the vision of a world where all electronic devices are connected together to form a single, coherent network of heterogeneous devices. In theory, such a large network could collect real-time data from the physical world that can be used to solve all our problems, improve traffic in large cities, reduce pollution and energy consumption, take better care of the elderly and so on.

All this sounds nice in theory, but the reality is unfortunately different.

Early in my research, I realized that the Internet of Things is merely a scam – it is a leaky concept. On the one hand we have academic research that is not really concerned with standardization issues, therefore many incompatible solutions/projects have been explored by diverse research groups pretty much in isolation. On the other hand, we have the industry which is very interested by standards, as many companies that want to lead the IOT, so hundreds of protocols to communicate with devices have been created, proposed, even standardized. But are these standards really used? I mean by more than a few thousands IT experts in a very specific domain?

Let me illustrate this with a small sample of such standards commonly used in home automation and machine-to-machine communication. How many of you know and can develop using one of these protocols? Humm… yeah… This is exactly what I mean by leaky concept. Such a messy world where all of these protocols – or non-standard standards as I like to call them – co-habit, cannot become a unique Internet of Things. The reality today is that we have built many Intranets of things. Yes they work and do the job, but they remain isolated islands of a few connected devices. These islands have practically no way to interact with each other, and this observation reduces the classic vision of Internet of Things to merely an utopia. The status quo, makes it hard to share and reuse solutions, as for each new deployment tons of things need to be developed over again from scratch.

This is a huge waste of time and resources.

In fact, there is already a single standard out there to bind them all. We all know it and use it everyday: the Web.

It is efficient and works well, and the reason the Web has become so successful is because it was free, open, flexible, and designed to be massively scalable. But above all, the main reason it has worked is because it was so simple, open, free, so anyone could use it. You became part of the Web by designing your first Web page using Frontpage and cheesy animated GIFs. Anyone could be part of it. All you needed was a computer, a modem and a text editor. This aspect is so fundamental that with my colleague Dom, we have explored how to adapt this magic recipe for electronic devices. They have a right to be part of the Web too, and as I will explain in this talk there are many reasons why they should be. Beyond obvious business opportunities by web-enabling devices, we have accumulated two decades of knowledge in building massively scalable, secure, and efficient Web sites. We have built a wealth of expertise for distributed caches, replicative DBs and so on. Why not reuse all that for devices too? Why do we need to reinvent wheels?

My argument here is that there is not a single world wide web, but 5 of them. We can see them as various trends, or facets of the Web as we know it today, and we all know and understand them. But, at the intersection of these 5W, when all these pieces are put together, a whole new, unknown territory emerges, and brand new possibilities to solve old problems are unlocked. This design space there is what we call the Web of Things. But first, let’s first focus a little more on the physical Web and programmable Web.

Once upon a time, electronics and programming was reserved to the highest social class of our civilization, geeks. However, one day processing and Arduino appeared. This explosive cocktail has revealed to the world the conspiracy nerds were setting up, by demystifying our virtues and showed to the world how easy it actually is to program. Since then, countless designers and other people who were not meant to touch technology were suddenly empowered to create digital artifacts easily, on their own.These tools are an incredible example of how simple tools can democratize programming, by lowering the barrier for fast prototyping physico-digital artifacts.

How many of you can program processing/arduino?Not enough.

We want more people to be able to access and use real-time data. Not just raw sensor readings. I’m talking about data people care about. Data that can make our lives easier. Data that could make us happier. We believe the Web of Things to be the next evolution of the Web by enabling the democratization of programming and active citizenship. We believe this because the Web offers the lowest possible access barrier to simply create something that you can share with the world. Now how many of you have already made a Web page? Or setup a blog? Get my point? Everyone is a potential developer for the Web of Things. And you will be able to access and integrate real-time data from all kinds of sensors, simply by pasting some HTML code on your web page.

I would like to share the vision of a large ecosystem of ubiquitous digital services roaming around, freely accessible. Imagine an ecosystem of reusable and shareable sensors, devices, and services that can be accessed simply via a Web API, using simply your facebook login information. Just by sending HTTP POST/GET request to a device, you read a sensor, you open a door. There are two ways to interact with this ecosystem: 1) “READ”: collect data they record automatically and analyze it, or 2) “WRITE”: pop up your phone, browse the space you’re in for example query for an empty restaurant, call a cab, turn on lights, music or AC.

Mobile ad-hoc interaction

Let’s start directly the WRITE aspect first through an example. Imagine you go to a hotel in Japan, it’s freezing and you’re handed a remote like this. Chances are the accompanying translation such as this one is not included. What do you do? Why can’t you just pop out your phone and control the AC directly with it? Or setup your alarm or book a tennis course offered by the hotel? Or even better, discretely ordering some champagne and caviar for your lady and play some romantic music while dimming the light? In a hotel room in Japan you’ve never been!!

Now… what if I told you that for less than 10 dollars, you can buy a simple chip with a Wi-Fi antenna that could turn anything into a Web server? This means, any electronic thing can be connected to the Web and can be controlled via a Web API, and you would literally browse around the “physical” page of your room and find about the things in the physical world you could control? And just like most Websites in the world, it would recognize the language your phone and give you the room page in this same language.

Niwea is a term coined out by my friend hannes gassert, and stands for Native Interoperable WEb Apps (I wrote a bigger post about this earlier). If you’re in the software industry, chances are a client or your boss told you “we need an iphone/symbian/windows mobile/android app”. Of course, many self-respecting developers might reply “no, you don’t really. You can do this apponly need a simple HTML/Javascript app that uses CSS style sheets to render your applications on these diverse mobile phones”. So you only develop once a Web app, and it’ll run on many devices. After this simple suggestion, the contra-argument generally goes along the lines of “bla bla want iphone app bla bla!!”. Sencha, jQTouch, iui are some of those frameworks. They are not great yet, but it’s only the beginning. Think about it: how many of you have made an iPhone app? Should I ask again about Web apps? iPhone developers: few and expensive (won’t even mention code maintenance), Web developers: cheap & easy (and we got lots of ‘em).

If you need performance or support for the native platform (GPS, camera, audio, etc), the N of niwea kicks in. Using phonegap, you can transform your Web app into a real, native app that will look, feel, and work just like the real thing. Only that it took you a few hours and $$ to make.

I do believe many more frameworks for fast prototyping Web apps (especially mobile) will appear and mature in the next years. Hopefully, more complete IDEs such as Flash) for developing interactive mobile Web apps with a few clicks. There is so much potential there!

Real-time cities

Now let’s look at the other interaction mode, the “READ” aspect. O’Reilly has just organized STRATA, a conference that looks into data science – that is how to address this big question: how to efficiently analyze tons of raw data to extract meaningful information that could improve business process, marketing, etc.

But what if the data in question is physical data? I spent the last couple of months exploring this possibility with the Senseable City Lab at MIT, on a project called LIVE Singapore! Let’s take a city, for example Singapore. Lot of digital data traces are generated there every second via cameras, sensors of all kinds, radars & electronic road pricing, people with mobile phones, etc.

All this data represents a goldmine for everyone, if only it were to be used. Unfortunately, different companies collect it only to ensure everything works fine, and that’s it. It’s then stored behind closed doors – or worse, deleted – but rarely thoroughly analyzed. If only one could access it, so much valuable information could be extracted from it – valuable both for the company who could improve their processes or optimize their operations and citizens at large.

According to this excellent blog post from libellium (worth reading):

Optimizing water used to irrigate parks, managing the lighting in a smart way, providing an information system of free parking spaces or water leaks in pipes are problems common to most cities: they all could be treated with an intelligent monitoring system that would help in the daily management of resources.

There is a lot of information there that could be used to build a more efficient city, and using new technologies to collect this data represents a massive potential to build more efficient cities. In the LS project we are building a massively scalable platform that allows to collect hundreds of streams of raw data from various agencies in real-time and process all that to infer higher-level information that can be dispatched to various agencies to optimize joint efforts.

I do believe a company that is very active in this area is IBM, via their Smarter Planet initiative. I am not affiliated to IBM and the ideas I express here are only mine. But they are a great case study because they are a global company that embrace the internet of things not just as a gadget or research topic, but as a concrete product that can solve major challenges our civilization faces. Recently they partnered with the city of Rio de Janeiro to build a new operations center that operates independently of any agency while receiving data from several of them, running it through a battery of algorithms to monitor, predict, and visualize vital information in real-time to decide how best to respond, and answer optimally things such as: “Which streets will require the most troops? Which hills are most prone to mud slides? Are there shelters that have vacancies? Which hospitals have beds available? What is the best way to exit from a soccer match at the Maracana? How should officials direct traffic coming from the Copacabana Beach? Where are police cars, emergency, ambulances? Where they should go?”

Water management

Drinking water is an increasingly valuable resource throughout the world, and as cities get bigger, efficiently distributing water is becoming a major issue. Current infrastructure is aging, pipe failures are fairly common (leaks, bursts) and various reports show that on average 30% of drinkable water is lost during transmission, the system operation and management itself is often inefficient, water can be contaminated biologically or chemically. These problems have tremendous effects! First, financially it’s a lot of investments and profits that go down the drain… literally. Besides, an exploding pipe in downtown costs lots of money to repair and degrades public image. Finally – and most importantly – it is a major public health concern, as in case of water shortage the energy costs to keep up with water demand will explode. Today, we know what comes in and what comes out, but the spatial and temporal resolution of data collected within the system is very low: we just know there’s a leak but we don’t know where and when exactly it happened.

New water management strategies and technologies are a major challenge we need to address, and the sooner the better. This is another project my colleagues from CENSAM are working on in Singapore. Called Waterwise, this project aims to monitor continuously the drinking water distribution systems using sensors distributed throughout the water distribution system. Connected via a 3G connection, they are able to monitor in almost real-time the various conditions inside the pipe system such as pressure temperature, and analyze the chemical and biological composition to detect abnormalities. Firstly, the ability to quickly detect, localize leak/burst, and react quickly can reduce the amount of water lost through leakage, reduce customer disruption and minimize the extent of pipe repairs. Secondly, on-line hydraulic modeling and calibration of a water system gives an accurate, up-to-date picture of the hydraulic state of a system (flow and pressure) and the estimated consumption/demand patterns within a water distribution system.

Real-time logistics

Some people might still wonder “Ok great, but can I actually make money with this WoT thingie”? The answer is yes, and tons of it. A use case we have worked on while at SAP was how to build much more flexible BI application that tap the power and flexibility of the Web. There are many important bits of information in an RFID-based supply chain, the 5W (what, when, where, who, which), and we need to integrate them efficiently and in real-time in other operations.

• The “what”: what tagged products (EPCs) were read.
• The “when”: at what time were the products read.
• The “where”: where were the products read, in terms of Business Location (e.g. “Floor B”).
• The “who”: what readers (Read Point) recorded this trace.
• The “which”: what was the business context (Business Step) recording the trace (e.g. “Shipping”).



The EPCIS network (stands for Electronic Product Code Information System) is a set of tools and standards for tracking and sharing RFID-tagged products. It is there and used by many companies, and built by many global vendors such as SAP, oracle, IBM sell, or even the open source implementation, called Fosstrack. However, much of this data remains in closed networks and is hard to integrate. Obviously the existing products are pretty expensive and not for the average consumer.



Dominique has been exploring how to make it easier to use all this data, to integrate it into various applications, and especially how to build more flexible, scalable, global application for better logistics. We create an EPC appliance in the cloud (Amazon EC2) and we we build Web APIs for accessing every standard in the cloud. With this, one can create:

1) a scalable, distributed DB for the RFID events (readings),

2) Business intelligence widgets using the EPCIS REST API,

3) Mobile Web Apps that can be used to monitor readers in-situ (HTML5 push for the actual implementation),

4) RFID / Sensors / Business apps (e.g., ERP) Web mashups (even people can do that, e.g., what to do when an object gets stolen?)

Fears

Over the years, we have received much criticism about building such an Orwellian society where everything is interconnected, tagged, tracked, monitored. I can’t deny these fears are justified, but just like with any other technology it’s not good or bad. It’s essential to put in the place not only the technical, but also legal barriers to minimize misuse of all this data. So let me ask you something: Are your e-banking transactions publicly available over the web? no. Are your emails publicly available online? No, unless you hit the notorious “reply all” button. Can I access your company’s intranet? Of course not.

We have been building sufficiently secure websites for almost two decades, and in the Web of Things, these well-known mechanisms would come for free. I’m not insinuating these are perfect, but that they are good enough for most use cases. So why not just leverage them for physical devices?

Conclusions

1. WoT is here and it matters, but it is not the best solution for everything.
2. Think about niwea when you think mobile
3. Stop talking, start prototyping

I hope that I’ve been able to explain what is the Web of Things, why is it different from the Internet of Things, and in what this difference matters. Hopefully, as more people understand the value and potential of sharing data for not only themselves, but for all of us, we’ll see more such projects emerge. This in turn will accelerate innovation and allow us to build more efficient and sustainable cities, without sacrificing the quality of life.

We would like to thank once more here all the people who helped and supported us (financially and psychologically) throughout our research. Of course our professor Friedemann Mattern and our colleagues and students at the distributed systems group at ETH Zurich. Then SAP research and the EU projects socrades and sensei that have funded half of our phd. Then you all, the community that inspired us and reminded us that what we do actually matters, you’re all great!

A very brief post to announce that the deadline for submitting papers to the Web of Things workshop was extended to the February 11, 2011.

Meanwhile we are also organizing some nice add-ons to the workshop like a hack-camp, some nice products demonstrations, a best paper award and hopefully a nice dinner so that we can all strategize together about the future of the Web of Things! So, you have one more week to submit your papers, we look forward to read your papers!

I didn’t blog much in the last months as I was fortunate enough to spend the second half of 2010 as a researcher at the MIT SENSEable City Lab. I spent most of my time working on the LIVE Singapore! project (and living between Boston and Singapore), in particular exploring the “so what?” aspect of WoT – that is how to actually build something useful on top of all these sensors. This project is very timely and matches wonderfully with what’s happening right now in the data.gov and smart cities spheres.

We have seen most IoT/WoT projects applied to smart buildings and home automation, and other mobile interaction scenarios, but it is worthwhile to consider how this fits the bigger picture and think of more meaningful scenarios. As more and more people will move to cities, it will become essential to rethink pretty much every aspect of the infrastructures our cities were built upon. As sensors and other tiny computers are being deployed in our cities, there are strong incentives by making all this data available, publicly and simply, as evidenced by recent conferences organized by O’Reilly, such as Strata or Gov 2.0 summit.

Cities are a goldmine of data, and who can derive most meaningful information out of this mess of data, will be happy. Most efforts in the real-time/big data domain are mainly concerned with digital data, such as stock exchange, fraud detection, or network security, and little effort has explored the use of physical data. But this is where the real potentials of WoT lie: the real world. Both smart cities and their data, along with the underlying technologies to support such applications, are the things to watch out for in 2011.

As I am speaking about all this next week at lift – both the Web of Things in general and how it aligns well with the current trend in smart cities – and also organizing a workshop on this topic with liftlab colleagues Nicolas Nova and Fabien Girardin, I’ll be posting soon a detailed wrap-up about my talk with lots of notes and links and pix. As I am also, currently writing my PhD dissertation, be sure I’ll soon be sharing more about these things right here.

[I have shared a few more "personal" thoughts. I think it's important to make this blog more social, human-centered. Not simply by adding I like buttons on facebook or "tweet this", but also share more our own experience with the WoT. Feel free to let us know your thoughts. Yeah, we'll be adding some "tweet this" and "I like" buttons pretty soon too...]

Besides the fact that we are big Sun SPOTs fans, we also got increasingly more interested in the OpenPicus platform, not only because the constant motivation of the project founder Claudio Carnevali is impressive but mostly because the FlyPort (the OpenPicus wireless sensor node) is featuring a WiFi module and a Webserver (according to them our WoT community influenced them on that point) which makes it a nice, compliant, Web of Things device.

Yesterday, the OpenPicus project released their free, open-source, IDE which supposedly makes it really easy to develop Web of Things applications backed by Wireless Sensor Nodes.

The team asked us to post some news about the IDE, instead of that, I decided to test it and report here:

1. Got the IDE here. First small decrease of my tremendous motivation: the IDE is .NET/Windows-based, hem, slightly strange choice provided the WoT community is probably 50% mac, 50% Linux (or it least I’d like to believe so), but let’s not be so futile, and simply remove the dust off my XP VMWare virtual machine.
2. The IDE requires the .NET 4 framework which installed smoothly on my VM.
3. Unzip, sorry un-rar (Duh! Ok, let’s download 7 Zip) the IDE.
4. No install required, neat, the IDE starts smoothly. It has a familiar Office 2007 / 2010 look and feel. It’s actually not bad, simple and quite efficient. The code-completion works fine which really helps discovering the OpenPicus and FlyPort API.
5. I plug my FlyPort for the first time in my VM, again it is smoothly discovered as a USB/Serial port, which means the install does not need any additional driver.
6. This video, guides you through your first FlyPort project. The whole process ran smoothly on my VM as well (for people using Linux like me and wanting to use the OpenPicus IDE in a VM, make sure you get a WiFi dongle, as VMWare maps any native WiFi interface of your computer to a wired network in the guest operating system.
7. The video also shows how to deploy the native Webserver to the FlyPort, which takes, in essence, 3 clicks and is entirely customizable so that you can make your services truly RESTful, very neat!

To sum up, I need more experience with the device to really judge it (coming soon!) but it seems like a very good platform for easly prototyping Web of Things applications, very good job! On the drawbacks I would have liked a Java, cross-platform, version of the IDE and Flyport stack rather than a .Net one but I must admit that the IDE’s simplicity and integration is impressive and after all what only really matters to us is the out-of-the-box ability to hide the FlyPort’s internal language behind a Web API (more to come on that part as well, I’ll test the FlyPort against the Web of Things cookbook!).

No breaking news in this post, but we were just informed about the fact that one of our articles was in the special selection of Service Oriented Computing of IEEE Computing now as well as Featured on ZDNet.

We never really talked about this work because it largely discusses WS-* services (DPWS in particular) which are also known as “evil-services” by the RESTifarians

We actually began our IoT journey with DPWS, were quite frustrated with it, but it evolved a lot since then, became an official OASIS standard, and thanks to the crew of WS4D became a lot less buggy and a little less heavy.

While we still stick to a more pure Web-approach because of its simplicity and ease of integration with the existing and fast growing world of the mashable Web, in this paper we were trying to federate them both and to explain how they could be leveraged to create an composable Intranet of physical services in an company.

The paper discusses the differences between REST and DPWS, points at several features of DPWS that are addressed in limited ways by REST (and vice-versa) such as service discovery: you can discover REST resources by getting their URI (HATEOAS but how do you get that URI in the first place, how do you resolve it?) and proposes the use of small local units, called LDUs (Local Discovery Units) to enable the discovery of both DPWS and REST services.

It also discusses how to improve the “searchability” of services for developers so that they can find the service they look for in the real-world context they want. For this it uses the LDUs (e.g., services inherit from the location of LDUs) as well external services such as Wikipedia, Google, or domain-specific portals, to extend the available semantics with extracted keywords, without overloading the devices (e.g., sensors) themselves with heavy semantics (btw, sorry but we actually were forced to patent the process )

Finally, I’d like to point out that DPWS papers are welcomed to WoT 2011, we actually had some at WoT 2010! We are especially interested in report of experiences on how can DPWS and REST coahbit, because after all, nothing prevents you from using DPWS-enabled devices if you need some of its features but design nicely interoperable RESTful APIs on top.

A few weeks ago we described our framework for making the standard RFID network (EPC Network) part of the Web of Things.

We are happy to announce that the framework was accepted to be part of the leading Open Source RFID infrastructure (Fosstrak) and is available on the Fosstrak forge.

In order to foster adoption we created two useful resources, in the user and developer guide you’ll find a detailed description of the API and install procedure (basically 4 clicks if you already have a running Tomcat instance).
Additionally, an introduction video details the features of the framework and showcases an application (an RFID Business Intelligence Dashboard that you can test live on our Google App Engine Instance).

Beyond the software, the fact that the EPCIS Webadapter offers a RESTful API for a service that is currently offered through a WS-* (WSDL + SOAP) interface makes it an interesting case-study. Indeed, we lack (we as a community, since this was one of the conclusions of WoT 2010) a better understanding (and proving?) what the benefits of RESTful architectures are when compared, from a developer point of view, to other systems such as WS-* or Big Web Services.

Thus, if you do use the EPCIS Webadapter, please let us know what your experience was in this online form, your feedback is very valuable!. We already got some early insights from another study, but that is going to be the matter of a next post and paper

WoT researchers and community members, warm-up your keyboards, we are waiting for you submission to WoT 2011!

After a successful WoT 2010 workshop, we are glad to announce WoT 2011, co-located with Pervasive 2011.

Here is the call for paper, please feel free to redistribute!

CALL FOR PAPERS – Second International Workshop on the Web of Things (WoT 2011)
in conjunction with Pervasive 2011, San Francisco, June 12-15 2011.

Paper submission deadline: February 4, 2011
Notification of acceptance: March 11, 2011
Camera-ready papers due: March 21, 2010
Workshop date: June 12, 2010

Official Website: www.webofthings.com/wot/2011/

The world of embedded devices has experienced radical changes; real-world objects such as home appliances, industrial machines and wireless sensor and actuator networks embed powerful computers which often can connect to the Internet. Likewise, more and more common objects are being tagged with RFID tags or barcodes. Considering the recent progress in mobile communications (increased bandwidth for cell phone networks, as well as urban wireless broadband networks), Internet access will very likely become a commodity accessible from most real-world devices. This convergence of physical computing devices (wireless sensor networks, mobile phones, embedded computers, etc.) and the Internet provides new design opportunities and challenges, as digital communication networks will increasingly not only serve virtual data (images, text, etc.), but also serve access to real objects. While the “Internet of Things” has become a well-known brand for a set of research issues in the pervasive and ubiquitous computing communities, the main focus of this research theme has been on establishing connectivity in a variety of challenging and constrained networking environments. Our hypothesis is that the “Web of Things” is the next logical step in the ongoing evolution, enabling new applications and providing new opportunities. The Web of Things takes the next step from establishing connectivity and thus the ability to communicate with Things, to a vision where Things become seamlessly integrated into the Web, not just through Web-based user interfaces of specific applications, but by simply blending into the information and interaction space created by the Web and its architectural principles. The “Web of Things” workshop solicits contributions in the areas of architectures for a Web of things, decentralization, real-time interactions with things, services for the physical world, Web-scale applications, as well as questions of user interface and interaction design, where a Web of Things requires application designers to think beyond standard Web browsers and embrace alternative clients such as mobile devices or even more constrained environments.

Topics:
- Distributed Web-infrastructures fostering the Web of Things
- Real-time communication with the real-world
- Deployments, and evaluation of Web of things systems
- Human-things interaction models and paradigms
- Web composition of the physical world and physical mashups
- Searching and discovering things and their services on the Web
- Security, access control, sharing of physical things on the Web
- Applications of the Web of Things (smart homes/cities/factories)
- Business opportunities for the Web of Things
- Use and developments of latest Web technologies for the physical world (e.g., 6lowpan, HTML5, microformats, REST, cloud and services, social networks, etc.)

In this second edition of the workshop will will consolidate the community and focus even more on the Web aspect of networking things. We will provide an interactive forum for WoT researchers to learn and discuss about existing efforts to enable cross-fertilization. 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.

Organizers:
Dominique Guinard, ETH Zurich / MIT Auto-ID Labs
Vlad Trifa, ETH Zurich
Erik Wilde, UC Berkeley

Program Committee:
* Rosa Alarcon, Pontificia Universidad Catolica, Chile
* Liselott Brunnberg, MIT Mobile Experience Lab, USA
* Adam Dunkels, SICS, Sweden
* Christian Floerkemeier, Auto-ID Labs, MIT, USA
* Gary Gale, Nokia, Germany
* Vipul Gupta, Oracle Labs, USA
* Masayuki Iwai, University of Toyko, Japan
* Artem Katasonov, VTT Labs, Finland
* Tim Kindberg, matter 2 media, UK
* Gerd Kortuem, Lancaster University, UK
* 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
* Diego Lopez de Ipina, University of Deusto, Spain
* Friedemann Mattern, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
* Florian Michahelles, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
* Guido Moritz, University of Rostock, Germany
* Claro Noda, Universidade do Minho, Portugal
* Jacques Pasquier, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
* Cesare Pautasso, Universita della Svizzera Italiana (USI), Switzerland
* Dave Raggett, W3C, UK
* David Resseguie, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA
* Till Riedel, TecO Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
* Albrecht Schmidt, University of Duisburg Essen, Germany
* Vlad Stirbu, NOKIA, Finland
* Inaki Vazquez, University of Deusto, Spain

Lately we’ve been quite busy working on different book-chapters. As we finalized one of them I wanted to share it with you. This chapter is the draft version (before final edition as this is the one we are actually allowed to publish here, for the final version you should buy the book!) of a chapter the “Architecting the Internet of Things” book, edited by Mark Harrison, Florian Michahelles and Dieter Uckelmann.

Quite an interesting book filled with chapters on how to make the Internet of Things a reality, ranging form how to build the infrastructure to how to make it profitable. The book will be published very soon by Springer and we’ll make sure to update you whenever it’s out!

Meanwhile please enjoy the draft of our chapter, which is basically something we wanted to come up with for a long time: a cook-book on how to implement the Web of Things in your daily prototypes and/or products. This chapter was written in a way that it is accessible to a broad range of people not necessarily familiar with the core of modern Web-technologies.

Writing it was a nice adventure from us as we co-authored it with two of our mentors: Erik Wilde who ensured that the “Web-touch” was accurate, and Fridemann Mattern, one of the fathers of the Internet of Things, who made sure the “IoT-touch” made sense!

In our second talk at IoT 2010 we presented a project we kept warm (and working on) for a little while now: bringing RFID to the Web. Not RFID in the sense of small RFID readers like the nice phidget reader meant for prototyping, but the world of standardized RFID networks and in particular the EPC (Electronic Product Code) Network and its EPCIS (Information Service).

The Electronic Product Code Information Service (EPCIS) is a standard which defines interfaces enabling RFID events to be captured and queried. The query interface, implemented with WS-* Web services, enables business applications to consume and share data within and across companies, to form a global network of independent EPCIS instances. However, the interface limits the application space to the rather powerful platforms which understand WS-* Web services.

In the EPCIS-Webadapter (aka. REST-Adapter) project, we propose seamlessly integrating this network into the Web by designing a RESTful (REpresentational State Transfer) architecture for the EPCIS. Using this approach, each query, tagged object, location or RFID reader gets a unique URL that can be linked to, exchanged in emails, browsed for, bookmarked, etc. Additionally, this paradigm shift allows Web languages like HTML and JavaScript to directly use RFID data to fast-prototype light-weight applications such as mobile applications or Web mashups. We illustrate these benefits with a JavaScript mashup platform that integrates several services on the Web (e.g., Twitter, Wikipedia, etc.) with RFID data to allow managers along the supply chain and customers to get comprehensive data about their products.

You’ll find the paper (btw, IoT 2010 best paper award nominee) here the slides below as well as the project description, source code, and live demo on our new “projects” page. As I moved to the MIT Auto-ID labs to work on this project for about 6 month, there will be more coming, stay tuned!

(btw, thanks to Vipul from Oracle Labs, for coming up with the nice title of this post )

Together with Vlad and Erik Wilde, we’ve been trying since a while to write a scientific paper out of our common technical report that would sum up the founding concepts of the Web of Things. The paper finally got accepted for IoT 2010. This is a good sign because it emphasizes the fact that the Internet of Things community is now really looking into Web standards as a candidate common integration bus for the application layer of the physical world. A fact that did not really hold two years ago, when Erik’s attempt to publish a WoT paper at IoT 2008 did not succeed.

In a nutshell the paper is based on the fact that many efforts are currently centered around creating large-scale networks of “smart things” found in the physical world (e.g., wireless sensor and actuator networks, embedded devices, tagged objects). Rather than exposing real-world data and functionality through proprietary and tightly-coupled systems, in the paper we propose to make them an integral part of the Web. As a result, smart things become easier to build upon. Popular Web languages (e.g., HTML, Python, JavaScript, PHP) can be used to easily build applications involving smart things and users can leverage well-known Web mechanisms (e.g., browsing, searching, bookmarking, caching, linking) to interact and share these devices. In this paper, we begin by describing the Web of Things architecture and best-practices based on the
RESTful principles that have already contributed to the popular success, scalability, and modularity of the traditional Web. We then discuss several prototypes designed in accordance with these principles to connect environmental sensor nodes and an energy monitoring system to the World Wide Web. We finally show how Web-enabled smart things can be used in lightweight ad-hoc applications called “physical mashups”.

Enjoy the paper here, feedback is very welcomed!

Below is the current version of the slides I’ll present tomorrow at IoT 2010 in Tokyo:

It’s a known fact that we (or at least) love Sun SPOTs. Not the ones on the sun but the Sensor nodes developed by Sun Labs (now/soon Oracle Labs?) a couple of years ago.

Speaking Java better than any language out there (including French ), when the first fully-natively-java Wireless Sensor Nodes came out you can imagine my joy. Since then I can’t remember a paper we wrote that does not use Spots in its prototype! We worked quite a lot with them, created several stacks to make them “Web-enabled” and RESTful, to make them part of the Web of Things!

When we had the chance to meet part of the Sun SPOTs crew at WoT 2010, they told us they were about to release some software to be able to apply and experiment with the Web of Things concepts.

Well, here we go! The Sun SPOTs now have their own WoT stack. Probably the most important innovation when compared to the already available WoT stacks for the SPOTs (such as ours), is a Nano App Server. Inspired from the Java App Servers, which are basically Web Servers on steroids, it lets you register Web Apps which run on the nodes or on the gateway (i.e., host PC). The Web Apps are then responsible for handling part of the URL subspace (e.g., /…/blink which would be an app for making the SPOTs LEDs blink) and serving the Spots functionality in a RESTful manner.

The Nano App Server also offers support for great functionalities that definitely make sense for such small nodes such as HTTP compression or built-in support for caching!

All of this is best summarized on Vipul Gupta’s blog. Tutorial files and coding exercises are also available on this blog. Last but not least, a presentation guides your through the most important parts and steps, enjoy!

A few weeks ago we were talking about the importance of evaluating WoT applications with real-users as they might(/surely do) have expectations that are tremendously different to our geeky notion of what are useful applications of a Web of Things.
Well today I wanted to share with you a venue that might go towards this directly as it is specifically looking at HCI and human aspects of smart things, enjoy the CFP:

==========================================================
Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects
at IUI 2011
http://www.smart-objects.org
Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA

February 13th 2011
==========================================================

THEME
——-
There is this undeniable ongoing trend to put computing capabilities into everyday objects and places. Well known examples range from smart kitchen appliances and objects (smart coffee machines, smart knifes and cutting boards) up to smart meeting rooms and even city-wide infrastructures.

These smart objects are fully functional on their own, but added value is obtained through communication and distributed reasoning. While other venues have focused on the many technical challenges of implementing smart objects, far less research has been done on the topic of how the intelligence situated in these smart objects can be applied to improve their interaction with the users. This field of study poses unique challenges and opportunities for designing smart interaction.

Smart objects typically have only very limited interaction capabilities. Yet, their behavior exhibits an amazing amount of intelligence. For example, several digital cameras are able to recognize faces in a scene automatically and adjust the focus accordingly. For first time users this can be quite surprising, and for experts this is a feature they probably want to turn off. The challenge is to design intuitive interaction with smart objects in a way the user feels in control of the smart object and understands the behavior and capabilities of the object.

Interaction with smart objects is situated in the physical environment of the user, i.e., it does not take necessarily takes place in a desktop setting. A smart object often uses additional cues from its context to improve the interaction with the user, thereby, making the interaction between user and smart object feel more natural. Furthermore, a smart object is a physical object which allows to exploit approaches from tangible and embodied interaction to enhance the interaction.

The aim of this workshop is to leverage the discussion on the design of the interaction with smart objects. Thereby, we want to bring together researchers from all related fields like human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing and psychology.

We seek high quality contributions that explore the combination of intelligent interaction with the specific characteristics of smart objects, including but not limited to:
- novel interaction concepts for smart objects
- self-explanatory smart objects
- multimodal and adapted interaction
- context-awareness
- embodied and tangible interaction
- intelligibility of smart objects
- user studies and evaluation techniques
- technology and models required for enabling the interaction with smart objects

WORKSHOP FORMAT
—————
Our goal is to leverage the discussion between researches from several disciplines and thus to advance the research of interacting with smart objects. To stimulate discussion between the workshop participants we plan a poster and demo session. We want to spark further discussions during in-depth discussions on selected topics. We accept submissions in the following categories:

- position paper (2 pages)
- short papers / demo papers (4 pages)
- full papers (6 pages)

IMPORTANT DATES
—————-
Submission Deadline: November 12, 2010
Author Notification: December 12, 2010
Camera-Ready versions: December 19, 2010
Workshop: February 13, 2011

ORGANIZERS
———-
- Melanie Hartmann, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
- Daniel Schreiber, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
- Oliver Brdiczka, Palo Alto Research Center, USA
- Kris Luyten, Hasselt University, Belgium
- Max Mühlhäuser, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany

Imagine every home appliance being 1) IPv6 enabled 2) RESTful, imagine the tools you could create on top of such an eco-system!
In particular, imagine the idea of “physical mashups” becoming a reality in our homes sweet homes: creating simple, ad-hoc applications on top of your appliances as easily as you can create Web 2.0 (virtual) mashups nowadays. The dream of every hacker and tech-saavy? Well at least one of our dreams (and part of my Ph.D. proposal by the way )!

Well a dream that we have been trying to demonstrate and implement lately. The outcome is two papers. In the first one, “Mashing up Your Web-Enabled Home” (Bibtex for references is here), presented at Touch The Web 2010 we especially look at the requirements for a home mashups and propose an early framework on which mashup editors can be easily built. We also illustrate the use of the framework and guidelines by means of two concrete mashup editors, one built upon the nice Clickscript mashup tool, one built on Android that let’s you manage the energy consumption of your home from your smart-phone. More in the paper, enjoy the slides below:

In the second one, “Embedding Internet Technology for Home Automation” (Bibtex for references is here, co-authored with Matthias Kovatch and Markus Weiss), we look a bit more at the alternatives. What are the limitations/advantages of the Web of Things when applied to the home environment, in particular when considering a RESTful Architecture on top of IPV6. How does it compare with technologies traditionally used in home environments such as X10 or EIB/KNX.

Ready to mashup your home?!

Some of you might remember/have attended our SXSW 2010 workshop. Well we enjoyed giving it so much that we decided to come up with two brand new proposals for this year’s SXSW!

The Real-World as a Web API is our first proposal:

The world of “physical devices” such as home appliances/electronics, real-time city data, RFID-tagged objects, mobile phones, etc. has long been longing for a seamless and universal integration platform. Out of a great number of heavy-and-not-so-great middleware a surprising one is emerging: the Web! In this presentation we would like to show how Web developers might well be the next generation of real-world hackers. We’ll demonstrate how the current developments in Web standards make it one step closer to the real-world. We’ll show how REST and the light IPv6 (lowpan) protocols fit really well to control most physical devices. We’ll illustrate how the real-time Web (Web sockets, Pubsubhubbub, Twitter, etc.) makes it easy to sense the world and get physical devices to trigger events. We’ll show how HTML 5, Microformats/data, rich snippets and social networks can help us to search and share the real-world. We will finally show how this Web integration and Javascript toolkits (e.g. JQuery, Sencha touch, etc.) enable us to mashup the world on the Web layer as we wish: from configuring our connected homes to building on top of our real-time cities with our mobile phones. The success of books such as “The Next Internet” or blogs such as Web of Things and theinternetofthings.eu emphasize it: the Internet of Things is coming and Web developers are its most powerful actors!

Next, we have a closer look at the city use-case in:

The public infrastructure of our cities are obscure structures whose workings are not accessible to most citizens. What if every sensor in our cities would have a Web API anyone could access in real-time and mashup? Open and easy to use Web platforms that enable efficient integration, processing, storage, and access to the enormous amount of data digital cities generate are increasingly needed, and we’ll explore the various technologies that are making such solutions possible. Furthermore, we’ll go much more beyond the technical aspects of such a platform to address the more controversial implications of such an Orwellian scenario. Hopefully, this session will provide a forum for the different disciplines involved in the design of future cities to establish a common ground for better interdisciplinary cooperation and understanding in this area.

The idea is to concentrate the first workshop on the technology side and the second a little more on the conceptual side, if you want to be able to attend any of those at SXSW 2011 then please vote here: The Real-World as a Web API or here Web Mashup Platforms for Future Programmable Cities. Or better vote for both
Votes are closing Friday 27th of August!

We are organizing the First International Workshop on the Urban Internet of Things at the IOT 2010 conference, at the end of this month, and we would love to invite you all to submitting a demo or a paper.

Unlike the WoT2010 which brought together WoT researchers, we emphasize here concrete applications practical solutions that can be built on top of WoT. We particularly welcome real-world deployments that can highlight the plus/minuses of using WoT as infrastructure for a scalable urban-scale data collection and processing.

We would like to bring closer practitioners in the area of smart cities (industries that build the various components of smart cities such as infrastructure, sensor, software, middleware, hardware, etc), along with researchers in various fields related to networked objects (that’s why we do this workshop in the context of IOT conference), and with architects/designers/urban planners that are in charge of designing the points of contact between citizens and this invisible (& growing) digital infrastructure.

The outcome would be for participants to get to know the latest trends in research/technology (& each other) and at the same time get practical insights about the challenges in building such scalable (city-wide+) infrastructures to collect, process, share and store huge quantities of real-time data from various urban sources. Pretty much like a combination between twitter and data.gov, but for sensor data which emphasizes open access to real-time data streams from cities (public APIs that anyone can access and code with).

As we wanted to avoid a “classic” mini-conf like workshop to enable active participation, we have been preparing a few surprises that will allow you to get your hands dirty and join the conversations and hands-on sessions with world-class experts in this area. More to follow soon.

Also, we are still looking for sponsors that could cover the travel costs of our keynote speaker, so if you know someone or are interested to sponsor us in exchange of some promotion/visibility, please get in touch with us (info@{guesswhat}.com would do).

Read more on the official call for papers/demos.

A few days ago I had the chance to participate to the “touch the Web 2010” workshop.
The goals of the workshop were rather similar to the ones of WoT 2010 however, rather than being hosted at a Ubicomp/Pervasive venue, Touch the Web was collocated with ICWE2010, a pure Web engineering conference.

The most surprising fact was probably how close the two communities are getting. Web people are increasingly interested in embedded/physical/sensor computing, and on the other hand, pervasive people are getting more and more convinced that the Web protocols as not so bad after all (take this paper for instance), at least good enough for a good range of applications. Quite a change of mindset compared to a year ago.

One of the good outcomes of the workshop was the fruitful final discussion. Three big challenges seem to emerge: the discovery of things, the real-time things and understanding the needs for Web-enabled things. Three challenges that were also identified as keys at WOT 2010.

Discovery
We need to look at describing things so that they can be both discovered by machines (i.e. network discovery) and their “services” understood by humans (i.e. service discovery). REST is good, REST is great but it’s raw expressiveness is not enough to understand things. By crawling a RESTful API you can find the resources it exposes, by reading the URIs you can get rough “tags” (e.g. /temperature) describing their nature. But this is not enough for users, neither for machines. As an examples, attendees mentioned the need to generate sense-making UIs on the fly or to customize page rendering depending on the thing one discovers. A simple example of this is Google rich snippets where the search engine renders the page results differently if they embed some semantics. What if Google could render search results for things in a way that helps users interacting with them.

Thus, researchers are exploring ways of better describing things directly inspired from the semantic Web. In “A Triple Space-Based Semantic Distributed. Middleware for Internet of Things” the authors suggest using RDF. In the mashup framework we presented an RDFa based solution to be able to integrated newly discovered devices as mashup actors directly. Those solutions however have the drawbacks of being based on well-know syntax but “proprietary semantics”, i.e. they cannot be understood by One alternative we (and others) currently explore is the use of Microformats which enables to use “agreed-upon” lightweight semantics. Their recent fast-pace expansion makes them even more interesting (I should post about our early experiments with things and microformats here soon!).

Real-time Things
Next in line of the important aspects for a WoT was the need for real-time communication patterns. Not ground-breaking, since this topic has been around WoT architectural discussions since the beginning but the workshop made it clear: client server architectures are great for controlling things, but for monitoring we also need things to be able to push data. Of course, we would also like this push pattern to be as Web oriented as possible. On the REST-side People talked about Atom and especially the latest push based mechanism using it, aka PuSH (or pubsubhubbub). On the more WS-* side, speakers talked about using WS-eventing. We also talked about our experiences with WS-eventing in DPWS (a device tailored WS-* stack) and concluded that it was getting better but still quite heavy for many devices and rather hard to get hands on.
Overall it seemed that this space for still open for further exploration. Speaking of which we also presented a paper at the main conference about a light messaging service for things called RMS (Vlad will tell you more about it here soon!)

Understanding the Needs for Web-enabled Things
Last but not least one really tricky question emerged: “why do we do this?” We propose a re-programmable world where everything is created not as a single purpose object but rather as an API ready for opportunistic applications, but do people want that and why?
Most of the people there believed they do and for various reasons ranging from sustainability (objects have a second life thanks to involving them in new use cases), to customization (things are often not quite the way we want them to be) and satisfaction of DIY (Do It Yourself).
However, raising this question is key and depicted the strong need for better understanding the “mashup space” from an end-user point of view. What would people like to mash in their homes, cities and offices?