Category: Technology

Towards the WOT Manifesto 1,673

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 1,805

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...

A RESTful API for CERN’s LHC 1,298

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 3,001

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 1,938

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...

Keynotes at Lift: David Rose 1,421

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...

LIFT Workshop – FULL (and cool!!) 122

LIFT Workshop – FULL (and cool!!)

We just finished our LIFT workshop, and it WAS GREAT! Tons of interesting people from all around joined us (too many of them, so sorry for those we had to throw out). We started with a short introduction by Alexandra, Dominique, and Me about the past and the future of the internet of things. [Alex’s presentation coming soon] UPDATE: it’s here Alex’s presentation: Shhh, they’re listening, a subjective history of the Internet of Things View more presentations from Alexandra Deschamps-sonsino. (tags: lift09wot internetofthings) Dom’s presentation: From the Internet of Things to a Web of Things View more presentations from Dominique...

WOT is that? 2,023

WOT is that?

Comrades, I have the feeling (okay it’s actually a fact) that the web of things is actually too much of a spiritual feeling, an aetherical concept with a lacking connection with the real world. In short, tons of people asking me “what the hell is all this fuss about Web of Things? Is it not the same as Internet of things? I don’t get it dude? Why not just use CORBA?”. Well, let me disappoint you. For many, it will be the same shock as learning that Santa Claus doesn’t exist (sorry for those who didn’t know that either). The...

David Culler Part 2 1,390

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...

David E. Culler, UC Berkley on RESTful Sensor Networks 3,010

David E. Culler, UC Berkley on RESTful Sensor Networks

Today, Vlad and I had the chance of taking part to a talk from David E. Culler from UC Berkley, one of the main TinyOS contributors. While Vlad is going to summarize the talk a bit later here, I’d like to talk a bit more about the end of the talk. One one of his slides he had a figure of what he would like to see implemented on WSNs at the node level. Besides a comprehensive IPV6lowpan (aka 6lowpan) stack he mentioned an implementation of HTTP and, moreover, a web server! The next slide was about sense making and...