Some of you might remember/have attended our SXSW 2010 workshop. Well we enjoyed giving it so much that we decided to come up with two brand new proposals for this year’s SXSW!
The Real-World as a Web API is our first proposal:
The world of “physical devices” such as home appliances/electronics, real-time city data, RFID-tagged objects, mobile phones, etc. has long been longing for a seamless and universal integration platform. Out of a great number of heavy-and-not-so-great middleware a surprising one is emerging: the Web! In this presentation we would like to show how Web developers might well be the next generation of real-world hackers. We’ll demonstrate how the current developments in Web standards make it one step closer to the real-world. We’ll show how REST and the light IPv6 (lowpan) protocols fit really well to control most physical devices. We’ll illustrate how the real-time Web (Web sockets, Pubsubhubbub, Twitter, etc.) makes it easy to sense the world and get physical devices to trigger events. We’ll show how HTML 5, Microformats/data, rich snippets and social networks can help us to search and share the real-world. We will finally show how this Web integration and Javascript toolkits (e.g. JQuery, Sencha touch, etc.) enable us to mashup the world on the Web layer as we wish: from configuring our connected homes to building on top of our real-time cities with our mobile phones. The success of books such as “The Next Internet” or blogs such as Web of Things and theinternetofthings.eu emphasize it: the Internet of Things is coming and Web developers are its most powerful actors!
Next, we have a closer look at the city use-case in:
The public infrastructure of our cities are obscure structures whose workings are not accessible to most citizens. What if every sensor in our cities would have a Web API anyone could access in real-time and mashup? Open and easy to use Web platforms that enable efficient integration, processing, storage, and access to the enormous amount of data digital cities generate are increasingly needed, and we’ll explore the various technologies that are making such solutions possible. Furthermore, we’ll go much more beyond the technical aspects of such a platform to address the more controversial implications of such an Orwellian scenario. Hopefully, this session will provide a forum for the different disciplines involved in the design of future cities to establish a common ground for better interdisciplinary cooperation and understanding in this area.
The idea is to concentrate the first workshop on the technology side and the second a little more on the conceptual side, if you want to be able to attend any of those at SXSW 2011 then please vote here: The Real-World as a Web API or here Web Mashup Platforms for Future Programmable Cities. Or better vote for both 🙂
Votes are closing Friday 27th of August!
