Category: Research

Towards the WOT Manifesto 1,640

Towards the WOT Manifesto

I’m taking a couple of days off in Romania, to chill out and reorganize my brain. We’ve been so busy working with Dom lately that we barely had time for WOT, and even less for getting our work done. Mainly tons of papers, meetings, talks, and barely no time to hack/code, and that kind of sucks. We both agreed that in the coming months, we’ll cut off random unproductive activities, to really focus on our work and building the Web of Things. I’ve notice that all the people I talk to not really understand what WOT is about, and for...

Towards the Web of Things: Web Mashups for Embedded Devices 1,691

Towards the Web of Things: Web Mashups for Embedded Devices

After having some troubles getting the Web of Things idea accepted by the scientific community it seems like the last weeks bring the wind of change 😉 The paper: “Towards the Web of Things: Web Mashups for Embedded Devices” we submitted a while ago to the MEM workshop of the WWW 2009 conference just got accepted. In this paper we better explain the concepts behind the Web of Things, namely we talk about the way we implement RESTful APIs for embedded devices. Furthermore, we discuss the different integration methods to connect embedded devices and sensor networks to the Web. Showing...

Energie Visible: A Video 2,843

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 1,802

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” 1,631

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 1,820

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...

Building the Web of Things (WOT) Community 1,813

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...

Tikitag now becomes touchatag 2,608

Tikitag now becomes touchatag

Our friends from tikitag, just rolled out their new website (and name, and applications, …). The had copyright issues with the older name so now they are touchatag. I have to admit tikitag was a way better name than touchatag (no offense), as this new name actually makes me think of feldpausch in terms of sex appeal (maybe it’s just me). I have been playing with their readers for quite some time, and find them quite cute and easy to use. Maybe I’d like to see more open code to use their reader from different languages (I just have some...

Cudrefin02 on Plogg 244

Cudrefin02 on Plogg

Koudos for Dom’s hard work, whose energy monitoring project made it on the ploggs new page. Awesome work he’s done with REST-enabling the ploggs. Even better, we’re soon gonna ploggify our work environment and offices which is an awesome step towards a RESTful ecosystem of devices where we’ll be able to play around. The only problem is that ploggs guys only gave us a windows DLL as an API to play with the ploggs which makes it hard (I mean impossible) to access plogg with a mac or a linux. Let’s hope we’ll soon get something smoother to read ploggs....

David Culler Part 2 1,308

David Culler Part 2

David started with the introduction of the early visions for the internet of the future, with tons of real devices integrated to it. It was commonly argued that the classical OSI layers were to disappear in the area of WSN, because very optimized applications, fully customized for particular purpose were necessary. David argues that this view was wrong, because with recent IPv6 full stacks on devices (I’m thinking of the ones in TinyOs and Contiki) one could extend directly the Internet on devices, without requiring protocol translating bridges. Which rocks, coz gateways will become just routers. With this implemented, WSN...