After WoT 2010 in Mannheim, WoT 2011 in San Fransisco, we are happy to announce WoT 2012 co-located with Pervasive 2012 in Newcastle, UK.

Over the last few years, WoT has profiled itself as a major event for the Web of Things community and we can’t wait to see y’all there once again. So, get your ideas/projects/prototypes ready, set, submit!

CALL FOR PAPERS – Third International Workshop on the Web of Things (WoT 2012)
in conjunction with Pervasive 2012, Newcastle, June 18-22, 2012.

Paper submission deadline: March 9, 2012
Notification of acceptance: April 2, 2012
Camera-ready papers due: April 20, 2012
Workshop date: June 19, 2012
Official Website

The world of embedded devices has experienced radical changes over the past few years. Real-world objects, or “Things”, such as home appliances, industrial machines, and wireless sensor and actuator networks embed powerful computers which often are connected to the Internet. Chumby, Gumstix, Sun SPOTs, Ploggs, Nabaztag, and ioBridges as well as the proliferation of data aggregation platforms like pachube are just a few examples of the rapid development of such connected embedded computers. The convergence of sensing, computing and Internet-scale networking provides new design opportunities and challenges, as digital communication networks will increasingly contain real-world devices and allow direct read/write interactions with them. While the “Internet of Things” has become a legitimate research domain in the pervasive and ubiquitous computing communities, its main focus has been on establishing connectivity on the network level in a variety of challenging and constrained environments. As these lower-level, technical problems are being solved, a whole new world of higher-level problems open up. The “Web of Things” is the next logical step in this evolution towards global networks of sensors and actuators, enabling new applications and providing new opportunities. The Web of Things explores the layer on top of connectivity with Things and addresses issues such as fast prototyping, data integration, and interaction with objects. Because the Web is omnipresent and flexible enough, it has become as an excellent protocol for interacting with embedded devices, and the Web of Things is a vision where things become seamlessly integrated into the Web – not just through Web-based user interfaces of custom applications, but by reusing the architectural principles of the Web for interacting with devices.

The “Web of Things” workshop solicits contributions in all areas related to the Web of Things, and we invite application designers to think beyond sensor networks and Web applications, and to imagine, design, build, evaluate, and share their thoughts and visions on what the future of the Web and networked devices will be. The workshop aims at exploring the use of principles and technologies at the core of the Web such as Representational State Transfer (REST), syndication (e.g., Atom), and real-time Web technologies (e.g., HTML5 Web Sockets) for providing access to pervasive and ubiquitous computing services and also solicits contributions related to the Web-based composition of things and physical mashups.

Topics:
- Discovery and look-up for things and their services on the Web
- Web-based things composition and physical mashups
- Real-time communication with physical objects (e.g., syndication, streaming, instant messaging, Web push)
- Human-things interaction models and paradigms
- Security, access control, and sharing of physical things on the Web
- Application of Web tools and techniques for the physical world (e.g., REST, HTML5, caching, cloud services, social networks)
- Applications of the Web of Things (smart homes/cities/factories)
- Deployments and evaluations of Web of things systems
- Business opportunities for the Web of Things

The third edition of the Web of Things workshop series will provide an interactive forum for WoT researchers to learn and discuss about existing efforts with respect to the Web-based interaction of smart things. In order to ensure a high-quality technical session, submissions must cover one of the topics above and should not exceed six (6) ACM SIG Proceedings Template pages. Research papers must be original prior unpublished work and not under review elsewhere as they will be published to the ACM digital library and listed on DBLP. All submissions will be peer-reviewed and selected based on their originality, merit, and relevance to the workshop. Submission requires at least one author to present the paper on-site. For instructions on how to submit to WoT 2012, visit http://www.webofthings.org/wot/2012/submission.php.

Organizers:
Simon Mayer, ETH Zurich, Switzerland,
Dominique Guinard, Evrythng Ltd., UK,
Erik Wilde, EMC Corp., USA,

Program Committee:
Rosa Alarcon, Pontificia Universidad Catalica de Chile, Chile
Benoit Christophe, Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs, France
Christian Floerkemeier, Auto-ID Labs, MIT, USA
Artem Katasonov, VTT Labs, Finland
Gerd Kortuem, Lancaster University, UK
Matthias Kovatsch, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Marc Langheinrich, Universita della Svizzera Italiana (USI), Switzerland
Rodger Lea, University of British Columbia, Canada
Olivier Liechti, University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland, Switzerland
Marino Linaje, Universidad de Extremadura, Spain
Diego Lopez de Ipina, Universidad de Deusto, Spain
Friedemann Mattern, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Florian Michahelles, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Guido Moritz, Universitaet Rostock, Germany
Claro Noda, Universidade do Minho, Portugal
Jacques Pasquier, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Dave Raggett, W3C
David Resseguie, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA
Till Riedel, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Andreas Ruppen, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Vlad Stirbu, Nokia, Finland
Vlad Trifa, Evrythng Ltd., UK
Inaki Vazquez, Symplio, Spain

Update: There is a pretty relevant discussion about that going on in the Web of Things LinkedIn group, make sure your check it out!

Yes, the news came out a few days ago through the New York Times:

At Google X, where he is working on the Web of things, according to people familiar with his role, he has the mysterious title of rapid evaluator

So Google might well be working on the Web of Things. We, we kind of guessed already, through project like the Android at Home (which is you ask me is definitely missing the “Web” of “Web of Things”). However, I’m asking you, fellow WoTers, should we fear it or like it? How much of it is “land-grabbing” and how much is actual work-in-progress?

I’m willing to like it because it will generate a lot of attention to our field, but to fear it as well as their announcements might kill many startups in the egg based on bulldozer-type of marketing and the “if google does it we can’t be as good” syndrome (because, yes they are good!). You want an example: look at the Power Meter story, which was discontinued a little while ago after de-motivating a number of startups and researchers. We were amongst them as this announcement made us definitely give up the commercialisation of the Energy Visible project, wrongfully?

I’m telling you, WoTers from all over the world, let’s show them what WoT researchers and WoT startups can achieve. After all, we, WoTers are years of research ahead of them, aren’t we? What’s your take on it?

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

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!

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.

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.

We finally can announce the panel we’re organizing at SXSW Interactive 2011! Our panel is entitled: “Web Mashup Platforms for Future Programmable Cities“. We are delighted to have Dominique Guinard from… well you know him, Christine Outram who is the director of the City Innovation Group at Senseable City Lab at MIT and project lead of the Copenhagen Wheel project, and Rachel Sterne who is the freshly appointed Chief Digital Officer for the City of New York, and I will be hosting and moderating the panel. The reason I invited these fine folks was because each of them can bring a different perspective on future cities, ranging from very technical, to architectural, to social, to public administrations, etc. and to engage in a deeper discussion about the potentials, dangers, and next steps for building more efficient and livable cities.

Have a look at the official page, and here’s the abstract for the session:

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.

We’re glad to be part of SXSW again and looking forward this exciting event and wanted to thanks our guests for joining us. We hope we’ll see you there as well!

You might have noticed that the blog got a small lifting lately. This post is just meant to draw your attention on the three new sections of the blog:

1. Events: if you want to meet the WoT community, these are the places to be! We list there the latest workshops, conferences and hack-camps we organize, like the upcoming WoT 2011
2. Projects: we are currently in a heavy let’s-open-source-everything-we-have phase. Thus, expect to find more projects there soon. We already list two of them.
3. Publications: this is where you can find our common publications, ranging from scientific papers to book-chapters, presentations and video-recorded tutorials and talks.

All right we hope you’ll enjoy these goodies and look forward to get your feedback on them!

A little while ago took place the lift@hackerspace workshop, which was the second part of the Urban-IoT 2010 workshop that took place on November 29, in Tokyo, Japan. The Urban-IoT workshop aimed to bring together experts from various areas related to smart cities to present and discuss their research in a formal, academic context. As a follow-up, the lift@hackerspace event served to deepen the conversations in a more relaxed environment context, where the various participants could explore some of the main topics and challenges that emerged during the formal session, in an open discussion format among a couple of focus groups.

The beer and barbecue certainly helped for richer interactions.

Context: Open source hardware

Akiba who kindly provided us the space (and was the grill chef for the evening, thanks for everything buddy!), briefly described what a hackerspace is, how it works, who hackerspatians are and what they do. Just like fablabs, hackerspaces enable people interested in doing stuff to do just that, in a shared and collaborative environment which provides various tools for people to start experimenting with electronics and hack around different projects. He has presented us some of the work he has been doing with open source arduino-like devices that use various wireless communication interfaces, with a maximal range of up to 10 km. They are using these devices to provide farmers in rural areas in Japan a way to monitor in real-time environmental conditions in their rice fields. Beyond a funky problem, the important aspect was that a low access barrier to such devices (cheap, easy to code) is a central enabler for the internet of things. In the near future, such platforms could directly be used anywhere (using Wi-Fi, 3G, or satellite communication), and just like arduinos, could be easy to hack, and new sensors added so they could be used in various contexts.

Group 1 – LIVE Singapore! (Kristian Kloeckl, Vlad Trifa)

What if non sensitive real-time data feeds from city infrastructures and networks (transportation, telecommunication, commercial systems, sensor networks,…) are provided on one common platform. And what if this platform is made publicly available to developer communities to write applications on top? LIVE Singapore! is a five year research initiative between the city-state of Singapore and MIT’s SENSEable City Lab pursuing this goal and exploring opportunities and challenges involved with such an undertaking. In this group we discussed about possibilities as well as risks that such a platform poses. Since the LIVE Singapore! platform will be opened up to a larger community in the future, discussions such as this are valuable input for the development process. Some of the topics the encouraging outcome touched upon regarded bidding modalities to match dynamic supply and demand of services, dynamically emerging locations generated by ad-hoc people density, as well as reflecting and awareness creation of appropriation of public space by people.

Group 2 – Policies and interoperability (Dominique Guinard)

Among the participants of this focus group were Rudi Ball (Imperial College, specialized in mobile apps), Simon Mayer (ETH Zurich, working with us on the WoT), Till Riedel (from Teco, master of IoT middleware), Rodger Lea (University of British Columbia, Canada, master of IoT middleware as well), Ron Harris (Washington DC, Harris Firm, attorney specialized in patents around RFID and IoT), Ralph Barthel (UCL, UK, tales of things developer).

According to people actually implementing the WoT/UrbanIoT The discussion addressed three essential challenges:

a) discovery and search: how to find sensors in an UrbanIoT? How to find the relevant ones? How do we describe things? How do we link them efficiently?

b) centralization and decentralization: finding the tradeoff between centralizing data and decentralizing computation is a challenge, just as is the question of infrastructure vs ad-hoc (e.g. how much infrastructure is needed, can we do without, by enabling peer to peer, ad-hoc interactions).

c) incentive for sharing: how do we foster sharing, how do we make people share the sensors’ out-there? How do we makes companies and institutions publish their data? Beyond technological challenges, having people, companies and industries share their data seem to be the biggest barrier to the urban iot.

Group 3 – Etoy and life after death in a digital world (Hannes Gassert)

The bravest group at Hackerspace Tokyo explored digital afterlife, embodied interaction with the dead and hacking urban memory spaces and totems (monuments, graveyards, street names) within the framework of etoy‘s Mission Eternity Tamatar project.

We have been working hard to finalize the program of the Urban-IOT workshop that will take place very soon in Tokyo. In addition to a classic workshop with paper presentations and demos, we have prepared a second part, that will change your perception of what an academic workshop would look like. As we didn’t receive any industrial funding, we are sorry to say that we couldn’t afford to invite the people we had planned for a keynote (yeah, seems like industries aren’t interested in this topic… yet…). But no worries, we’ll use this time to hack and work!

From 3 pm onwards, we will all move to Tokyo Hackerspace, where we will first do a series of hands-on workshop, where different groups will take part in various activities (thanks a lot Akiba for organizing this). This second part will be a LIFT@home session where we will bring the most creative hackers, developers, researchers from Tokyo (and world), to discuss, design and prototype what the future of programmable cities will look like. After that, some (japanese) drinks and (japanese) food will be served until… well… until we’ll be politely asked to leave and make less noise. REGISTER HERE and join us.

The current program of the formal workshop is as follows (some things might change, but these are the final papers accepted at our workshop):

Welcome message (9:30 – 9:40)

Session 1 (9:40 – 11:00)

Break and Demos (10:40 – 12:00)

Session 2 (12:00 – 14:30)

Wrap-up (13:20)

End of the talk part (13:30)

At the end of the talks, we all will go to Tokyo Hackerspace for the second part of this workshop (the hands on part). All the participants are welcome to setup a demo of their ongoing projects in a very informal context. The goal is to get a chance to get feedback and engage in discussions about one’s work.

LIFT at Home – Hack Your City – (15:00 – 17:00) @ Hackerspace Tokyo

Hands-on open session on programmable cities. We will divide into various groups and focus on different activities. Amon others, we will present the LIVE Singapore! MIT SENSEable City Lab will present an early version of the LIVE singapore platform, and participants will be brainstorming about the possible futures enabled by simplified access to Real-time data in a city. What does the merging of data reveal? What applications can be imagined on top of this? Other group activities will take place and will be revealed over time. Feel free to forward this call and invite your colleagues to join us. -> Register here for the after party <-

After party (17:00 – …)

Entrance fee is 1000 Yen (to pay for food/soft drinks). Alcoholic drinks for sale, interactive installations and various happenings will take place to wonderfully finish this great day.   

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?!

Seems like the call for papers-season is opened again
Here is the CFP of the already well-known LocWeb workshop, an important Workshop for the Web of Things as location is certainly the most important and valuable context information for Web-enabled smart things!

********************************************************************

*** 2nd Call for Papers: LocWeb 2010 ***

********************************************************************

Third International Workshop on Location and the Web (LocWeb 2010)

http://medien.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/LocWeb2010/

Tokyo, Japan, November 29, 2010

Co-located with Internet of Things 2010 (IoT 2010)

http://www.iot2010.org/

Twitter: @LocWeb2010 (http://twitter.com/LocWeb2010)

The Third International Workshop on Location and the Web (LocWeb 2010) focuses on research and development that targets the intersection of location-aware devices and technologies with Web technologies and Web architecture. The rapid rise of multi-sensory mobile devices, network-enabled “things” and sensors and an ubiquitous connectivity open new possibilities provide the technologies to capture, share and use Web services and applications. We will have to bridge the physical world and the Web space, and location is one of the major connecting links. When Web services will “surround” us, we have to address the challenges of scalability and interoperability of the Web, and we also have to look at policy, regulatory, and legislative responses to the privacy and security challenges created by something as sensitive as location information.

* Dates *

- September 15, 2010: Submissions deadline for full papers, demos and short papers

- October 4, 2010: Notification of accepted papers, short papers, and demos

- October 14, 2010: Accepted authors have to register and submit the final version

- November 29, 2010: LocWeb 2010 workshop in conjunction with IoT 2010

* Organizers *

- Susanne Boll, University of Oldenburg, Germany

- Johannes Schoening, DFKI GmbH, Germany

- Erik Wilde, UC Berkeley, USA

* Program Committee (tentative) *

- Petri Selonen, Nokia, Finland

- Daniela Nicklas, University of Oldenburg, Germany

- Andreas Henrich, University of Bamberg, Germany

- Mor Naaman,Rutgers University, USA

- Vanessa Murdock, Yahoo! Labs Barcelona, Spain

- Ross Purves, University of Zürich, Switzerland

- Dominique Guinard, ETH Zürich, Switzerland

- Puneet Kishor, University of Wisconsin, USA

- Antonio Krueger, DFKI GmbH, Germany

- Keith Cheverst, Lancaster University, UK

- Eric Kansa, UC Berkeley, USA

- Brent Hecht, Northwestern University, USA

- Martin Raubal, UC Santa Barbara, USA

- Max Egenhofer,University of Maine, USA

- Georg Gartner, Vienna University of Technology, Austria

- Xing Xie, Microsoft Research Asia, China

- Jiahui Liu, Google Inc., USA

- Peter Froehlich, Telecommunications Research Center, Austria

* Theme *

With simple global connectivity and a constantly dropping price for services and hardware, the “Internet of Things” – the Internet connectivity of everyday objects – has become a reality. This means that computing systems are and will be “surrounding” humans and also many entities such as pets, cars, goods, or household appliances – wherever we go, wherever we are, at all times. Independent of the discussion whether ubiquitous computing systems will be invisible or not, connected things will always be located somewhere. Internet-enabled things will typically have a physical reference to some place, where they are or where they offer their affordances/services to the world: Pets are moving around, we drive in our cars, goods are stored and transported, household appliances have their place and function at some place in the home. And they are forming the bridge to persons and things who and that are are located at some place. This location often is crucial important contextual information for the computing systems involved. In consequence, we will have more and more ubiquitous computing systems that will have to find, use, and visualize localized information. Applications increasingly embed location as fundamental means for providing information and interactive services to a user. The biggest source of potentially localized information is clearly the World Wide Web. Early papers in the Web context assume that 20 percent and more of the Web is content that is related to a physical location. The involved refers to location by tagging content with places and regions and of course objects, by adding GPS positions to user generated content. Beyond the more explicitly embedded localized content Web scale geo-content mining and mobile search are sources of relating the digital Web to physical locations and objects. This workshop aims to address the research questions and challenges at the border between the localized information wealth of the Web and the local ubiquitous computing systems.

* Topics *

The authors are not limited to this list and focus on other topics relevant for the LocWeb community.

- Designing interaction for mobile users to interact with the environment

- Spatial awareness, location as context

- Sensing and applying user location for ubiquitous applications

- Beyond location – models for user mobility intention

- Analyzing mobility data to understand and predict users mobility behavior

- Ubiquitous search

- Extract and rank Web information on the basis of mobility detection of “hot” physical places from the Web

* Challenges *

The ubiquity of Web information becomes more and more possible as communities in geographic information retrieval are putting much effort into understanding location aspects in the unstructured Web. Also activities are there to make the more structured and semantic. Microformats are a small field but to be noted that tell about location aspects of Web content. The semantic Web activities and linked data will also aim to include location information. The same do new Web 2.0 sources such as Twitter which aims to make the location of the Tweet available. The challenge is to

- mine spatio-temporal aspects of Web content and Web 2.0 content related to Internet-enabled things,

- prepare, index, filter the relevant content that matches the current and local information demand,

- prepare Web content such that it can augment the situation and provide a localized information sphere “around” things and humans,

- match the context of Internet-enabled things with localized Web content,

- exploiting Web knowledge for providing more targeted services to user/owners of things,

- make the Web accessible for a potentially mobile user, and to

- visualize on embedded displays, be it tiny or large, personal or shared displays.

* Submissions *

We are soliciting position papers from researchers and practitioners in the fields described above. These papers should focus on current projects and work areas as well as on future work items and collaboration opportunities. We accept original and unpublished papers that are not under review somewhere else. Each position paper will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee, based on quality, relevance and balance of contributions to the workshop. All position papers will be published in the LocWeb 2010 electronic proceedings, which are published through ACM’s AICPS series in the ACM digital library (AICPS ISBN: 978-1-4503-0412-2). It is planned to publish revised versions of selected papers in a special journal issue such as Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

We accept long papers (8 pages), short papers (4 pages), and demos (2 pages).

Interested researchers should submit in the ACM SIG proceedings style (templates are available on the workshop Web site) to the EasyChair Workshop management system.

Submissions at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=locweb2010

Dear readers,

A few days ago we missed being listed here because our feed was ill (a weird, non ASCII char appeared in one of the posts)!

I gave it some steroids and while at it moved it to an Atom feed. For a RESTifarian community as such as ours, it was somewhat weird to actually support RSS and not Atom and its great, RESTful, AtomPub protocol.

Now, since I moved the default Atom, subscribed members might have some problems, many (only?) in the case they use a bad feed client.
Thus if you suddenly are not able to see the webofthings.com feed anymore (then you probably won’t read this message, hem) you might want to register to this, old-fashioned, RSS 2 feed, or get a proper reader.

Plus, you shall also comment this post to tell us how unhappy you are with this move to Atom as a default.
Yes, let’s make it political

Update: Check out WoT 2011 at Pervasive 2011

Since we came back from WoT 2010 about a month ago, I’ve been wanting to post a small wrap up about it. So let’s really do it before WoT 2011 takes place

Before WoT
The idea of launching the WoT workshop came from discussion with our Professor Friedemann Mattern and Erik Wilde from UC Berkeley. The main goal of the event was to bring together researchers interested in the Web of Things concepts and bootstrap a scientific community on the topic.

We got a total of 28 papers and 5 demo papers, not bad for a first edition! Our very supportive Program Committee helped us to select 12 papers (about 40% acceptance rate).

We wanted the workshop to be international and thus were glad that the submitted papers came from 15 countries as shown below.

During WoT 2010
The workshop was held at Percom 2010 and attracted about 40 totally motivated people. An number of people also came from the world of industrial research (such as the Sun Lab guys, presenting their great Sensor.Network.

Most of the participants where coming from the Ubicomp/Pervasive world and just two came from the “Web” world.
As one of our goals was to bring the two communities together we definitely see that there is room for improvement on that point (any suggestion? please comment!).

The topics where quite diverse but all discussions really focused on a “Web of Things” being either built using WS-* Webservice (the DPWS folk was well represented) or using REST. The discussions between the two communities were quite constructive and very far from those REST vs WS-* wars.

The workshop definitely did not only focus on those topics but rather started from there and discussed what was missing in those architectures and principles to fully apply them to things. The word cloud below tries to encapsulate the keywords of the presentations and discussions.

As you can see, lot’s of discussions were rotating around missing key features of the current architectures for things. In particular people talked about semantics and discovery of things. Several approaches where proposed. On the one hand-side the WS-* folks presented how DPWS had service discovery mechanisms directly at hand. The REST people explained how microformats (btw, we currently run a little study of Microformats for things to see how Google will register them!) and more generally the semantic Web could push discovery beyond the “discovery by browsing” paradigm of REST for more complex use cases. Sharing through social networks, concentrators such as Pachube or Sensor.Network or the use of a location infrastructure reflected in URLs were also mentioned as a means to better discover relevant smart objects.

The real-time Web was also a hot topic. Thinking about how event-driven protocols could be built and reused (e.g. Twitter, Pubsubhubbub) on the Web to better fit the needs of sensor networks applications.

More network related topics where discussed such as how to solve the mobility of smart objects and the fact that they often connect behind firewalls. Solutions like using reverse HTTP and Yaler where presented. Still in these topics, a number of paper dealt with evaluations of the proposed protocols and architectures (e.g. DPWS, REST, ontologies, etc.) for things. IPv6lowpan also gained momentum during the workshop as a (soon) viable solution to get rid of the Web of Things software gateways bridging non-IP networks with IP networks.

Finally, novel architectures and integration patterns (based on REST or on custom middleware such as SWE) were proposed to create an organized and composable Web of Things.

You’ll find all the papers and most of the presentations on the workshop official Webpage have a look at them, it is definitely part of the material that will influence the future Web of Things!

After WoT
Overall, WoT 2010 was a success, thanks to all the people who participated and made it valuable! Obviously I’m not the most objective person to say that but according to the feedback we got, people definitely enjoyed it and look forward to the next edition. Perhaps the only downside of this first edition was the lack of Web people… we can certainly improve that!

Speaking of which I wanted to get your feedback:
Where (@ what conference?) should WoT 2011 take place? (should it take place?)
Who should drive it?
When should we plan it for?
How do we get more Web people on board?

A few weeks ago I posted about a project we currently work on for sharing web-enabled things using social networks. During WoT 2010 (which I’ll wrap up here soon!) I had the chance to present it and got quite a good feedback.

People where mainly wondering about the scalability of such a system. If an access controller such as SAC was to be implemented for every “thing” how would that scale? We discussed its deployment on platforms such as Google Appengine which are highly scalable. We also talked about distributed versions of SAC.

People also had concerns about the “user-friendliness” of the approach. While using social networks instead of classical Access Control Lists seemed one step towards the right direction people mentioned the importance of being able to share with clusters of people rather than single persons. A feature which is probably going to be supported by most social network APIs sooner or later.

Last but not least we talked about the Social Network Standards. Researchers in the audience all agreed in one voice that OpenSocial was the way forward. Let’s just hope Facebook and Twitter will eventually join…

Anyway, thanks for the good feedback WoT 2010 crowd!
You’ll find the slides below and some more WoT 2010 slides by searching for WoT 2010 on Slideshare.

Several days ago I stumbled upon a very interesting video called Trillions, produced by Maya Research. It takes you on a short journey through the history of computing and ends up with interesting insights about the fast approaching challenges in the pervasive computing age. The guys at Maya claim that we need to change our way of thinking and start designing for trillions of interconnected objects. For inspiration they turn to the only system that seems to have achieved that and functions properly – Nature. Certainly a very interesting and futuristic view, I am looking forward to their revelations!

In any case the video is definitely worth watching. And the guys at Maya Research certainly have good ideas (e.g Interstacks) so check them out. And forgot to say they work with DARPA, which is always a good thing.

Enjoy!

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

As a few days ago, Netgear has released a gigabit and programmable router, the WNR3500, which is supported by the MyOpenRouter community. This is a fantastic piece of equipment as it enable developers (hint: us) to install custom software on router, typically WoT software that can bridge proprietary embedded devices with Web directly on a router, thus not requiring any additional devices for this purpose.

Just as Sputnik has done with legendary WRT54g, one can easily develop custom firmware running directly on cheap routers and sell the whole thing as an augmented product. Which is what that they did for offering a web-based management system for public Wi-Fi hotspots. Besides, just having the possibility of hacking directly with the router, allows you to integrate network-level data into your application (think of your router tweeting each time a new device connect and gets an IP address with DHCP). Can I be more explicit? Just get this thing, because at 119$ it’s a steal!

Oh did I mention that this beast has 64 MB Ram, USB 2.0, and a 480 Mhz CPU?

The first WoT workshop is still out, so prepare your submissions, because we have assembled an exceptional committee to discuss this essential topic! Check out the official workshop website.

-= CALL FOR PAPERS =-

First International Workshop the Web of Things (WoT 2010)
in conjunction with the 8th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2010), Mannheim, Germany

Website: http://www.webofthings.com/wot/2010

Paper submission deadline: October 18, 2009 November 15, 2009
Notification of acceptance: December 21, 2009
Camera-ready papers due: January 29, 2010

The world of embedded devices has experienced radical changes over the past few years as real-world objects can now easily connect to the Internet. This convergence of physical computing devices (wireless sensor networks, mobile phones, embedded computers, etc.) and the Internet provides new design opportunities and challenges. The Internet of Things has mainly focused on establishing connectivity in a variety of challenging and constrained networking environments, and the next logical step in the evolution in pervasive computing builds on top of network connectivity by focusing on the application layer: how to develop ubiquitous computing applications on top of heterogenous devices? The Web of Things is the vision that brings embedded devices into the Web by using Web standards as application protocol to interact with things. This workshop aims at bringing together the pervasive computing and Web communities to explore the possibilities for using the core principles and technologies of modern Web architecture (e.g., HTTP, REST, Atom, JSON) for seamless integration of things into the Web and developing applications on top of web-enabled devices (physical mashups). Research contributions are solicited in the following areas:

- Web-based interaction patters for embedded devices (streaming, eventing, etc.)
- Applications, deployments, and evaluation 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
- Web composition and macro-programming models (e.g. mashups)
- Semantic technologies for description of devices and services
- Optimization methods for embedded Web servers and applications
- Security, access control, and physical sharing of physical things on the Web

Since this workshop is the first in this area, the goal is to develop a community in this area and provide an interactive forum for researchers to learn and discuss about existing efforts to enable cross-fertilization. Hence, we expect all attendees to read all workshop papers in advance and to prepare questions for each. Presentations shall specifically highlight and address similarities and differences with other accepted papers. This will help to provide a forum to foster future collaboration, beyond the mere presentation of research results. In order to ensure a high-quality technical session, submissions must cover one of the topics above and should not exceed six (6) IEEE conference format pages. Research papers must be original prior unpublished work and not under review elsewhere as they will be published on the IEEE Digital Library. 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 fully register for PerCom 2010 and to present the paper on-site.

Organizers:
Dominique Guinard, ETH Zurich and SAP Research Zurich
Erik Wilde, UC Berkeley
Vlad Trifa, ETH Zurich and SAP Research Zurich

Program Committee:
Gregor Broll, DOCOMO Communications, Germany
Adam Dunkels, SICS, Sweden
Martin Gaedke, University of Chemnitz, Germany
Stamatis Karnouskos, SAP Research, Germany
Gerd Kortuem, University of Lancaster, UK
Marc Langheinrich, University of Lugano, Switzerland
Thomas Luckenbach, Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS, Germany
Friedemann Mattern, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Alexandros Marinos, University of Surrey, UK
Rene Mayrhofer, University of Vienna, Austria
Tatsuo Nakajima, Waseda University, Japan
Benedikt Ostermaier, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Cesare Pautasso, University of Lugano, Switzerland
Dave Raggett, W3C, USA
Michael Smith, W3C, Japan
Vlad Stirbu, NOKIA, Finland
Inaki Vazquez, University of Deusto, Spain
Agnes Voisard, Fraunhofer ISST, Germany

Dear all,

A short paper I have been wanting to publish for a while here. It is about the Web of Things demonstrator we presented at Pervasive 2009 in Japan, which is based on our Energie Visible project.

Since it is a short paper it does not present ground breaking results but it contains a bit more technical information on how the Plogg Gateway was built and on the resource orientation of the Ploggs. By the way, we finally managed to begin the deployment of the Energie Visible project in our own labs. The goal is to have Ploggs in each room of our lab managed by a small embedded gateway in each room as well. To that we will also add several other devices such as our RESTful Sun SPOTs and finally experiment mashing up these things together.

I’m rather eager to see how much it will influence our colleagues in their everyday consumption… (Vlad, how about you start shutting down your computer once in a while now already ;-P). But I’m even more eager to be able to test the Web of Things concept in a bigger setting! We’ll communicate the results, no worry!
Until then:
Enjoy reading the paper here!

Bibtex:
@inproceedings{dguinard:pervasiveEnergy:2009,
author = {Dominique Guinard and Markus Weiss and Vlad Trifa},
title = {Are you Energy-Efficient? Sense it on the Web!},
year = {2009},
month = may,
booktitle = {Adjunct Proceedings of Pervasive 2009 (International Conference on Pervasive Computing)},
address = {Nara, Japan}
}

As all of you know, one of the core concept of the Web of Things is design of RESTful things, that is having embedded devices proposing their services in a Resource-Oriented manner.

Today, once again, somebody was asking me but what is exactly a resource? Well good question! We all know (hem) what an Object is in Object Oriented Programming, we all know (hem HEM, yeah right!) what a service is in Service Oriented Architectures but what is a resource in a ROA?

I had this discussion with a good friend of mine (and a very good OO architect!) let’s name him, Patrik Fuhrer. His answer was that a resource is “information”.

I would extend this definition by mixing it with the definition of Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby (guys I never go anywhere without your book anymore). Inspired from their definition I would say a resource is:

Something, that can and that’s worth, getting a URI and links.

(For the records: updated according to Erik’s comment, used to be: Information, that can and that’s worth, getting a URI and links)

Now what do you think? I’m interested in your definitions. This might seem like a quite un-useful question but actually understanding that can greatly help us know where to stop creating resources.

Let’s say I have RFID tag read by some reader, i.e. an RFID event. Is the time at which the event was taken a resource itself or a part of the “event” resource. Should the information returned be entirely atomic, namely: the RFID event is a resource and every component of it is, in turn a resource. Or should we simply represent the time as part of the event.

Waiting for your input…

I would like to share in this post one of my fetishistic passion: the subtle combination of perverse interior design (read slick, minimalist, à la Apple) and high-tech home automation. In contrast to the depiction of the house of the future in science fiction (see the Monstanto house videos hereafter), I actually didn’t see many home automation solutions that people like you and me can (or would) buy. That Jetsonian ideal of an all automated, fully-networked smart house remains what you see at fairs, not in a house.

Domotics are not yet main stream products you find at Best Buy (or our local equivalent Mediamarkt), and as of today I see this market limited to two personality types: the high-income early adopter that loves technological fads (and can afford them), and the geek (like me) who likes to play around with technology and finds fun to build a twittering house or smart meter. In this first post of a series where I’d like to dig a little in the different aspects of the smart home (whatever that means), I’d like to provide a brief overview of the current state of the art in this field. The basic definition of the Smart House I will use throughout these posts is a set of interconnected devices embedded in a building or a room that make that place smarter (or automated). But what makes a building smart? According to Joe’s post, it is the ability to continuously self-regulate to provide a better living environment for the user, and at the same time minimize energy consumption. I love the way Joe phrased it (I adapted a little his phrasing to make it shorter):

“Continually measuring, analyzing, and acting is what differentiates an audit from sustainability. [..] Making buildings more efficient is not only about data, but you also have to know what to do and how to act on that data.”

Nicely said! It certainly has a real value for buildings and companies to automated their factories and utilities, and many companies have already understood it. But when it comes to particulars, does the smart house really bring something tangible, or is it just a caprice for rich pampered kids? I’d like to propose and discuss in this post the four main reasons why domotics didn’t really take off for end consumers, which are price, applications, standards, and privacy. These devices are quite expensive and it’s definitely not something we really need, indeed, why would anyone want to automate our homes? To provide some answers to this question, I’d like to share with you my list of applications we’d expect from the smart home:

• Entertainment (TV, radio, DVD, music, games, etc)
• Data storage (NAS, or a centralized data repository)
• Security (Door alarms, cameras, passive-infrared detectors)
• Lighting (automated, ambience effects, etc.)
• Utilities monitoring (Water, electricity, Gas, etc)
• HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air conditioning)
• Health Sensors (Nike+iPOD, blood pressure, etc)

This list is certainly not exhaustive, but shows that there are indeed many different things we could dream of in the house of the future (I’ll spare you the business plan argumentation). There are literally thousands of solutions available in each of these, but the big problem is many different standards exist to connect them, and interoperability between all these devices is a must in the smart home.

The main issue for the smart home is the popular beliefs and fear of technology. First appears the issue of privacy (“If the system gets hacked, then people can access the cameras in my house when I take a shower, monitor my whereabouts”, etc..), but also the danger of it (people can lock me inside my building, cut the ventilation, etc) as illustrated by the horror movies about elevators, where a high-tech building goes wild and harms the inhabitants. This is an essential issue that should never be underestimated, and a single technical failure can harm severely the image of the smart home. That’s why I think security should be an essential component for WOT (and neither Dom nor I are security experts . Volunteers, welcome!!

This is just a first post of a series where I’d like to go more into the details of home automation and internet of things. In the next post, I’ll go more in detail about the actual solutions and devices out there, and also focus more onto the different solutions out there to build the necessary infrastructure to build such connected buildings, and that’s where the research fits right in, build such an infrastructure (so that building new apps/solutions is cheap and accessible). More to follow on that soon!

All the medias in the world are talking about it, but we didn’t yet. We have an awesome announcement to.. well.. announce. Last week while Dom was busy eating churros and discussing about twittering chimpanzees, he was also preparing to go to a little village in Switzerland because he was told to go there for Energissima.

But why?

Because his project Energie Visible has won the Jade Nature award (and 10k chf with it), out of 20 other selected projects! The Jade Nature award recompenses an innovating project in the area of sustainability and protection of the environment. And that’s cool.

That’s awesome news, Dom, CONGRATULATIONS!!!!! It’s very encouraging for our work, and it clearly shows that we’re on the right track to make something so much bigger. If you all clap hands and do a standing ovation for the awesomeness of Dom, we’ll tell you more about it.

Read about it here, or here, or here.

Developer track at WWW 2009: Creating Personal Mobile Widgets without Programming by Geetha Manjunath, Thara S, Hitesh Bosamiya, Santhi Guntupalli, Vinay Kumar and Ragu Raman G. from HP Labs.

Geetha starts by explaining that people want widgets for very specified tasks, she’s talking about several tasks on the virtual world but then also mentions that we might want to use widgets to control appliances and possibly embedded device (Dom: I agree with her Dom again: but she did not elaborate on this later in the talk).

She introduces the concept of Tasklets, which are task-based web interaction patterns. As an example a Tasklet could be to notify me when XYZ stock gets a value of more than 50, or to notify a fisherman about the forcast of tomorrow for his fishing region. Geetha goes on by presenting an ACM Widget which connects to HP internal library, logs in automatically and downloads the paper specified by keywords.

She explains that we should give to users the power to package these personal, specific tasks into easy-to use widgets. This is basically what the project tries to achieve. Three steps are required to create a widget. First, the system observes user interaction patterns within the browser to extract data (e.g. usernames and passwords to access the digital library, clicks, etc.). Then the user can select zones of the browsed pages to be extracted later on (Dom: some kind of screen-scraping). All this information is then used to compile a Tasklet which can internally reproduce the same actions. The Tasklet can later be run from several devices simply by getting its URL.

In the demonstration she shows how to create a tasklet that gets your horoscope automatically. The process begins in the Tasklet tool which records what the user is doing. The tool also allows for the user to select and extract zones of the currently browsed web page. In our case we select the horoscope. The tool then renders, on the server-side, a Tasklet corresponding to our horoscope. Geetha then shows how the Tasklet can be used on several devices. First she uses it from her desktop, a double-click on the downloaded widget directly displays the right horoscope in our own language. Then she shows how the Tasklet can be rendered by an engine reading the horoscope aloud. She explains that this version could help porting the Tasklet to mobile phones in developing countries.

The beginning of a very nice project, I believe.

Keynote: Tim Berners Lee: Reflecting on 20 years of the world wide web.
Note by Dom: as usual this is not a real transcript but a mashup of a summary and my own interpretation of the talk.

Tim starts by talking about the program of www 2009 and in particular he sees that: Search and search optimization has a big place.Advertising science is also appearing as an important topic, which shows the tendency to also study how to efficiently monetarize the Web.The move to the mobile web is also definitely reflected in this year’s program.

He then moves on talking about the changing environment, mentioning the great hardware developments, the ever-growing data set. He also talks about things which remain (and should remain?) the same: the use and active creating of standards, the still very important web of document and the still growing web of communities.

He goes on with more technical concerns, talking about mashups he mentions the fact that we now really need a serious and clean trust system. Decentralized modular installation is also a feature he’d like to see up on the web soon. Just as we get Debian packets (e.g. using aptitude) we should be able to easily download and deploy applications and parts of the Web infrastructure directly from the Web independently of our platform.
Modularity in general is highly important for Tim. He would like to see a more modular Web where features can really be re-used (Dom: Fulllllllllly agree with that )

The next topic is open social networking. He starts talking about the WAP which did not take off because it was not the web, it was an isolated island not quite the Web. Mobile phone really became first class citizens when they actually implemented Web! access. He sees similarities in the was social networks currently behave, Facebook is an island so is Twitter. However, this has started to change. OpenId and more generally transportable identities should enable us to transport our identities and contacts from one island to the other. A tremendously important point for Tim. We should really get our data back!

He then talks about Linked Data which is also important in terms of social identities. Linked Data can help to infer on our social networks as well as on our several identities (Dom: e.g. TimBL is Time Berners Lee is creator of the web, etc.). He further explains that Linked Data is an attempt to extract our knowledge and capture it on the Web. For instance the answer to a question such as “how do you cure cancer” should be captured by organized, linked data on the Web. He would like to see a system appear using which you could extract the semantics of stored data. He takes the example of a relational database system containing company data, having a system that could understand this data and capture the company internal knowledge of that database would be very valuable.

He then talks about social concerns, in the field of privacy we should have systems going beyond simple access control we should also be able to capture acceptable use. For instance a doctor should be able to get access to all my data to save my life but if this doctor is also a friend of mind he should not be able to access this data out of the “saving my life” context.

To conclude Tim explains our role as Web scientists should be to build a platform for others that follow. We should also avoid assume what they are going to use it form. We should focus on our bit, other will do theirs!

Domenico Gendarmi and Filippo Lanubile talk about a Web Mashup for Social Libraries.

The goal of Domenico’s project (Colibrary) is to provide a web API to reuse content in the digital library domain. Domenico’s provides us with a system overview. For books you input an ISBN which is searched for on various book indexes (such as Amazon, etc.) and the Colibrary creates an RDF description of the book. Colibrary provides the same system for publications and papers, it queries databases such as Citeulike, bibsonomy, ACM digital library and creates an RDF description of the publication.

Domenico then elaborates on the main features of Colibrary. It provides a RESTful API which enables developers and people to create applications on top of Colibrary. He further explains that they had to use screen-scrapers since the API of books and papers databases did not provide all the functionality they needed. For instance Amazon did not provide them with a way to query social features related to books, like tags and reviews which Colibrary supports.

Domenico goes on demoing the application. He first searches for an author, the UI directly gives him the ISBN corresponding to this author. Once he selected the correct ISBN he gets an RDF and its visualization on a web page. He can further request for social artefacts for this book like tags and reviews which again, are gathered using screen-scraping. He then shows the use of the API, given a ISBN you can for instance retrieve all the reviews in the RDF format and use this data in your own application.

The API is available for testing on: http://collab.di.uniba.it/Colibrary/books/doc.html and http://collab.di.uniba.it/Colibrary/publications/doc_pubs.html and the client on: http://collab.di.uniba.it/ColibraryClient/
.

Frederic Majer, Martin Nussbaumer and Patrick Freudenstein Operational Challenges and Solutions for Mashups – An Experience Report

Frederic held the last presentation of this year’s MEM 2009. He starts by explaining how mashups often do not really mature. Operation and maintenance is a challenge and is often simply not considered which prevents mashup to turn into real and often-used applications. He explains how he will this paper describe general operational challenges from a provider’s perspective and present dedicated models and processes focusing on providing sufficient service level agreements.

He introduces the CampusMap mashup which helps people finding their way on the university campus. This example is now concretely deployed and thus Frederic can talk about their experience with its deployment. One of the main issue was that several stakeholders are participating (sometimes not consciously) to the final mashup. API providers, system administrators, that Frederic calls “operators” etc. all need to do their job the right way in order for the mashup to keep running.

He explains that a small change by one of the operators, who did not know the existence of the mashup, lead to CampusMap not working anymore. He explains that from an organizational point of view the operators, whenever possible, should be aware and committed to contribute. On the technical side a service level agreement should be agreed upon by at least all the internal operators (i.e. the university IT and general staff in this case).

He described a method to get to this service level agreement. For instance a mashup primary owner should be defined. He also suggest the use of automatic and dedicated monitoring environments controlling that the mashup runs in a correct manner and report when this in not the case. He also suggest pre-testing all external (and internal) service calls in order to see if these comply with the service level agreement. For instance if a service is just too slow on a regular basis it should not be used in the production mashup.

A nice question from the audience was, do you think there is a contradiction between the idea of having SLAs and the supposed “lightweight-ness” of mashups. Frederic explains that it IS a contradiction but in case of the CampusMap mashup it turned out that the mashup was so often used that it needed to get an SLA to ensure quality towards the customers.

Volker Hoyer (again ), Florian Gilles, Kathrin Fleischmann, Alexander Dreiling and Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva present the RoofTop mashup tool.

Volker is on the scene again, this time demoing RoofTop, a mashup editor for enterprise mashups. Volker compares the steps toward building a mashup to those on the market place: Knowledge, Intention, Contract or Design and Settlement. This is also the way RoofTop is structured.

He starts the demo by explaining how you can search for widgets either by browsing the catalogue or by means of keywords this is the so called-knowledge phase. The next phase is intention, that’s when the user decides on the widget he wants to add to his mashup.
After this we enters the Contract or Design phase where the widgets are arranged and connected on the dashboard space. For instance Volker selects both a Customer Data widget (connecting to a SAP system) and a Google Maps widget. Directly after adding them he can browse the customers and see their location on the map widget. Finally he adds a Google Mail widget which can be used to see mails related to a customer. The last step is the settlement, that’s when the mashup is actually executed and exported.

Finally he shows how context is used to suggest widgets and mashups to users. For instance if you are part of the marketing team and many of the marketing exec used a particular mashup the system is going to recommend you this mashup. Three axis or context features, can be used for recommendations colleagues, environment and business purpose.

You can see a video similar to the demonstration at MEM 2009 on this page.

Michiaki Tatsubori from IBM presents: Towards an Advertising Business Model for Composable Web Services.

Internet advertising is still really growing, slowly advertisers drift from traditional media like TV to the web where customization is more accessible.
Michiaki presents an example of a mashup service that consume several public transportation timetables to enable users querying a single tool to go from one point to the other.
He explains how this type of mashups actually kill the ads (and thus an important source of revenue for service providers) since the ads displayed for the composing services do not appear in the final mashup anymore. His solution is to create a contract between the mashups tools (e.g. Yahoo Pipes) and service providers. As a consequence the mashup of two services would also display the ads of each service. He further elaborates on the implementation of such a system and talks about a language construct to support it (see the paper for more details) and shows a concrete example for the Spot-to-Spot transit guide, the public transporation mashup he mentionned earlier.

He explains how this type of “contract” could also help to solve the issues of content “scraping” for instance by Google News. This way, the original editor (e.g. the Times) could still make money out of content displayed by Google News.

Hi all,

Sorry for being away for a while but we are actually preparing content which is going to be here soon! Anyway, that not the purpose of this post which aims at inviting all the Swiss members of WOT to a talk this evening in frame of the webmardi:
http://webmardi.ch/doku.php?id=meetings:2009-04-07-web_of_things

This talk will take place in Fribourg (lovely place to buy cheap but goooood chocolate). It is going to be for a community of hackers and developers and thus we’ll focus it on concrete examples and implementations of the web of things’ concepts.

It’s open to everyone so feel free to join! For those who can’t I’ll upload the slides here afterward.

Update: you’ll find the slides below!

The news came out this morning, the LHC of CERN is going to provide a RESTful API for anyone to be able to address the particles from the Web.

As an example, interested users can check the speed of any proton using URIs like:
http://cern.ch/LHC/hadrons/protons/1999998212321321321312372132137124081234312412341234/speed

April Bauer, head of communication at CERN said: “We expect people to quickly build mashups on top of this API”. When we asked for concrete examples she mentionned: “for instance a mashup with Google Map could show, in real-time of course, the position of any proton in the beam”.

For the records, a full speed the protons can travel up to 99.99% the speed of light thus, people might need to slightly increase the refresh rate of their screen in order to comfortably watch the mashups.

For more information please check the date of this post.