Author: Dominique Guinard

A RESTful API for CERN’s LHC 1,463

A RESTful API for CERN’s LHC

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...

Energie Visible: A Video 3,157

Energie Visible: A Video

I’m pretty sure that by now you got the fact that the Energie Visible project is one of our favorite use-cases for the Web of Things. In this project we apply the concept of smart things with webservers and RESTful APIs to create a plug-and-play energy monitoring system for your home or company. In order to better illustrate the application and for us not to have to carry a printer, a kettle and a… fridge around for each demo, we shot a video of the prototype. The end of the video also contains some more technical insights on the structure...

Using REST on SunSPOTs 2,108

Using REST on SunSPOTs

This post is the second in this series where we try to describe some of the concrete projects we are working on right now. The ultimate goal of the project was to create a smart logger that could be attached to shipments in order to monitor them while being transported or through their life-cycle, sort of a “ueber-RFID”. Of course, we wanted to use the REST principles in order to fully integrate the smart logger to the Web as well as to be able easily build applications on top of the logger. As smart loggers, we use the Sun SPOT...

Tim O’Reilly: “The next stage of Web 2.0 is going to be driven by sensors” 1,939

Tim O’Reilly: “The next stage of Web 2.0 is going to be driven by sensors”

Not that we did not know it, but when somebody as important for the Web community as Tim O’Reilly says it, it becomes even more true! Apparently according to Tim O’Reilly at the Web 2.0 Expo the next evolution of the Web is going to be physical or to be more precise, driven by sensors. In his O’Reilly Radar post, Dylan Field talks about a few concrete applications of this Web of sensors. We also listed some and are about to list the other ones we are working on. Understanding the use of the sensor Web and having examples of...

Web of Things Talk at Synetgies 2,096

Web of Things Talk at Synetgies

Hi folks! For those who live in Zurich (Switzerland…) or nearby we are going to give a talk as guest of the Synetgies organization. In particular the talk will focus on our smart unified gateways for devices which do not have IP/HTTP capabilities yet. We will also demonstrate some of our prototypes such as the Energie Visible and physical mashups using the Sun SPOT platform. The session is going to take place in room HG E 33.3 at ETH Zurich, Rämistrasse 101, 8092 Zürich. The session will start at 7.15 pm. After the session we’ll go to a bar for...

Keynotes at Lift: David Rose 1,590

Keynotes at Lift: David Rose

Great pleasure to be able to attend another talk from David Rose from Ambient Devices and Vitality Inc. Instead of a pure transcription I’ll try to sum up some aspects of the talk. Note that does not entirely reflect what Dave meant but rather my interpretation of the talk. Dave began by talking about clairvoyance and magics. He explained how they materialized these chimers into the well-known Orb which changes its color according to a trend. Dave then explained how ambient devices where between push and pull technologies, how they should be peripherial and seamless with the environment(s). He explained...

Building the Web of Things (WOT) Community 2,168

Building the Web of Things (WOT) Community

Dear all, Ok, Vlad and I have interesting (almost ;-)) things to say to the world but we are certainly not the only ones thinking about the Web of Things. Thus, the need to make this platform a … platform and not a two-man-show. A first step towards this goal is to start building a community of interested people. For that matter we added two widgets to the blog: WOTA COMMUNITY which is a Google Friends Connect community widget and WOTA CHAT! a chat box accessible to those who registered on the WOT COMMUNITY widget. We evaluated a number of...

Installing Goodies… 9

Installing Goodies…

[update] Ok it’s done for now, enjoy WOTA COMMUNITY and WOTA CHAT Hi all, in preparation for our lift workshop and BoF session we are currently adding community-oriented goodies, thus excuse us if the blog looks weird from time to time, we are just testing. Should be fixed by tonight!

The Web of Things meets Prof. Cesare Pautasso 71

The Web of Things meets Prof. Cesare Pautasso

For those who live in Switzerland (or not to far away) we will be presenting our work in the WOT at the University of Lugano on Thursday, March 26th. Besides the fact that Lugano is the sunniest place in Switzerland it is for us a pleasure to be invited by Prof. Pautasso. His work on REST architectures and especially on comparing and contrasting REST with WS-* (i.e. SOAP, WSDL, and the like) service has been quite inspiring for us. If I had to select one paper in this field it would certainly be that one: RESTful Web Services vs. Big...

Energie Visible: A Sustainable Web of Things Project 39

Energie Visible: A Sustainable Web of Things Project

Together with people (Dominique Guinard, Markus Weiss and Tobias Graml) from the BitsToEnergy lab of ETH Zurich we are actively working on a Web of Things system that helps people to better understand their energy consumption. A major burden for people, who want to save energy at home, is for them to identify how much energy is consumed by different appliances. How much does my computer consume in operation / when it is powered off? Is the consumption of my energy-saving lamp significantly lower in the long run than the normal lamp I’ve got there? Such questions are key to...