Architecting the Web of Things, for techies and thinkers!
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.
As Google recently announced their plans to move in the home automation world with Android at home (and we are still wondering why they waited so long to do it), I thought I would share my view on that. I do believe there are many opportunities ahead for the “home operating system” domain. The combination of cheap, yet powerful networked digital appliances in the house (NAS, networked media players, WiFi routers, etc) along with an extensible application framework, and a market place for buying new applications (or installing drivers, etc) – will be a killer combo for home automation to...
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...
Imagine every home appliance being 1) IPv6 enabled 2) RESTful, imagine the tools you could create on top of such an eco-system! In particular, imagine the idea of “physical mashups” becoming a reality in our homes sweet homes: creating simple, ad-hoc applications on top of your appliances as easily as you can create Web 2.0 (virtual) mashups nowadays. The dream of every hacker and tech-saavy? Well at least one of our dreams (and part of my Ph.D. by the way ;-))! Well a dream that we have been trying to demonstrate and implement lately. The outcome is two papers. In...
A few days ago I had the chance to participate to the “touch the Web 2010” workshop. The goals of the workshop were rather similar to the ones of WoT 2010 however, rather than being hosted at a Ubicomp/Pervasive venue, Touch the Web was collocated with ICWE2010, a pure Web engineering conference. The most surprising fact was probably how close the two communities are getting. Web people are increasingly interested in embedded/physical/sensor computing, and on the other hand, pervasive people are getting more and more convinced that the Web protocols as not so bad after all (take this paper for...
The first talk of the day I decided to attend is from Woralak Kongdenfha from the University of South Wales, I had the chance to talk to Woralak yesterday about this concept of using Excel as a Mashup platform. I’ve been quite into (physical) mashups lately and I quite liked the idea since Excel is certainly a tool that people (at least from a business or IT field) massively understand. They probably understand it better than novel mashup editors such as Yahoo Pipes and co. Woralak starts by explaining that they devices to use Excel as a mashup platform exactly...
Michiaki Tatsubori from IBM presents: Towards an Advertising Business Model for Composable Web Services. Internet advertising is still really growing, slowly advertisers drift from traditional media like TV to the web where customization is more accessible. Michiaki presents an example of a mashup service that consume several public transportation timetables to enable users querying a single tool to go from one point to the other. He explains how this type of mashups actually kill the ads (and thus an important source of revenue for service providers) since the ads displayed for the composing services do not appear in the final...
Mashups encapsulate this idea of making integration of service easier so that even normal people (i.e. not complete-geeks) can create small ad-hoc apps on top of services on the Web. We’d like to apply this approach to things so that you can for example, make your alarm clock talk to your toaster (e.g. I’m waking up, prepare my toats) without going into FPGA or PLC programming! Thus, we sent a paper at this (according to colleagues) state-of-the-art workshop on mashups. The paper got accepted and here am I, at WWW 2009 and live blogging the workshop for our beloved visitors...
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...
