Architecting the Web of Things, for techies and thinkers!
As hinted by Vlad on his last post, mobile phones and more specifically Android phones, are great actors of the Web of Things. The openness of the Android platform and the possibility of extending it both in hardware and software terms make it an ideal candidate for a universal Web of Things gateway!
A little while ago I had the chance to hold two presentations at Jazoon 2012 (probably one of my favorite tech conferences out there!). The key idea of the first presentations was to emphasize on how techs were getting mature for tagging our world out there. Hence, I decided to look in particular at how a device as common as an Android phone could be turned into a tagging machine, sort of a Tricorder of modern IoT times!
Part 1: Cloud & REST | Part 2: HTML5 WebSockets | Part 3: Physical Mashups A few weeks ago, I started posting a series about the project we were working on while at MIT: applying the Web of Things patterns and blueprints to the RFID global network (EPC Network). Better late than never, here is the last part of the posts series: Physical Mashups.
Part 1: Cloud & REST | Part 2: HTML5 WebSockets | Part 3: Physical Mashups In a recent post, we were explaining how in a project common to MIT and ETH Zurich, we simplified deployments of IoT applications based on the EPC Global standards. We operated this simplification by applying four of the Web of Things patterns: Cloud Computing, RESTful Interface, Real-Time Web and Physical Mashups. In the first related post we described how we used Cloud Computing and RESTful Interfaces. It is now time to talk a little bit more about one of the other pattern: the Real-Time Web.
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...
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...
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...
