Architecting the Web of Things, for techies and thinkers!
Besides the fact that we are big Sun SPOTs fans, we also got increasingly more interested in the OpenPicus platform, not only because the constant motivation of the project founder Claudio Carnevali is impressive but mostly because the FlyPort (the OpenPicus wireless sensor node) is featuring a WiFi module and a Webserver (according to them our WoT community influenced them on that point) which makes it a nice, compliant, Web of Things device. 😉
No breaking news in this post, but we were just informed about the fact that one of our articles was in the special selection of Service Oriented Computing of IEEE Computing now as well as Featured on ZDNet. We never really talked about this work because it largely discusses WS-* services (DPWS in particular) which are also known as “evil-services” by the RESTifarians 😀 We actually began our IoT journey with DPWS, were quite frustrated with it, but it evolved a lot since then, became an official OASIS standard, and thanks to the crew of WS4D became a lot less...
A few weeks ago we described our framework for making the standard RFID network (EPC Network) part of the Web of Things. We are happy to announce that the framework was accepted to be part of the leading Open Source RFID infrastructure (Fosstrak) and is available on the Fosstrak forge. In order to foster adoption we created two useful resources, in the user and developer guide you’ll find a detailed description of the API and install procedure (basically 4 clicks if you already have a running Tomcat instance). Additionally, an introduction video details the features of the framework and showcases...
WoT researchers and community members, warm-up your keyboards, we are waiting for you submission to WoT 2011! After a successful WoT 2010 workshop, we are glad to announce WoT 2011, co-located with Pervasive 2011. Here is the call for paper, please feel free to redistribute!
Lately we’ve been quite busy working on different book-chapters. As we finalized one of them I wanted to share it with you. This chapter is the draft version (before final edition as this is the one we are actually allowed to publish here, for the final version you should buy the book!) of a chapter the “Architecting the Internet of Things” book, edited by Mark Harrison, Florian Michahelles and Dieter Uckelmann.
In our second talk at IoT 2010 we presented a project we kept warm (and working on) for a little while now: bringing RFID to the Web. Not RFID in the sense of small RFID readers like the nice phidget reader meant for prototyping, but the world of standardized RFID networks and in particular the EPC (Electronic Product Code) Network and its EPCIS (Information Service). The Electronic Product Code Information Service (EPCIS) is a standard which defines interfaces enabling RFID events to be captured and queried. The query interface, implemented with WS-* Web services, enables business applications to consume and...
Together with Vlad and Erik Wilde, we’ve been trying since a while to write a scientific paper out of our common technical report that would sum up the founding concepts of the Web of Things. The paper finally got accepted for IoT 2010. This is a good sign because it emphasizes the fact that the Internet of Things community is now really looking into Web standards as a candidate common integration bus for the application layer of the physical world. A fact that did not really hold two years ago, when Erik’s attempt to publish a WoT paper at IoT...
Warning: this is an extremely technical post! But since this bug drove me nuts for a little while, I do have to expose it to the WoT community 😉 Finalizing the open-sourcing of our framework for making RFID tags part of the Web (more about that here!), I was testing it the whole day on various browsers. Firefox, fine! Opera, fine! IE, fine! Chrome, what the heck is that page!? As you might know, a resource in REST is not bound to a format (or representation as they call it). Rather, a well-done RESTful API should be able to serve...
It’s a known fact that we (or at least) love Sun SPOTs. Not the ones on the sun but the Sensor nodes developed by Sun Labs (now/soon Oracle Labs?) a couple of years ago. Speaking Java better than any language out there (including French ;-)), when the first fully-natively-java Wireless Sensor Nodes came out you can imagine my joy. Since then I can’t remember a paper we wrote that does not use Spots in its prototype! We worked quite a lot with them, created several stacks to make them “Web-enabled” and RESTful, to make them part of the Web of...
Ok, so we talked a lot about integrating sensor nodes to the Web, then about integrating home appliances to the Web or about integrating industrial machines to the Web. How about simple, dumb, traditional objects? Well the community is working on it! As an example, one of our latest projects is to Web-enable the global RFID networks (EPC) so that every RFID-tagged object becomes a true citizen of the World Wide Web (see our paper at IoT 2010). I’ll tell you more about this project soon but meanwhile I want to talk about even more dumb objects: those tagged with...
