A few days ago we missed being listed here because our feed was ill (a weird, non ASCII char appeared in one of the posts)!

I gave it some steroids and while at it moved it to an Atom feed. For a RESTifarian community as such as ours, it was somewhat weird to actually support RSS and not Atom and its great, RESTful, AtomPub protocol.

Now, since I moved the default Atom, subscribed members might have some problems, many (only?) in the case they use a bad feed client.
Thus if you suddenly are not able to see the webofthings.com feed anymore (then you probably won’t read this message, hem) you might want to register to this, old-fashioned, RSS 2 feed, or get a proper reader.

Plus, you shall also comment this post to tell us how unhappy you are with this move to Atom as a default.
Yes, let’s make it political

Before WoT
The idea of launching the WoT workshop came from discussion with our Professor Friedemann Mattern and Erik Wilde from UC Berkeley. The main goal of the event was to bring together researchers interested in the Web of Things concepts and bootstrap a scientific community on the topic.

We got a total of 28 papers and 5 demo papers, not bad for a first edition! Our very supportive Program Committee helped us to select 12 papers (about 40% acceptance rate).

We wanted the workshop to be international and thus were glad that the submitted papers came from 15 countries as shown below.

During WoT 2010
The workshop was held at Percom 2010 and attracted about 40 totally motivated people. An number of people also came from the world of industrial research (such as the Sun Lab guys, presenting their great Sensor.Network.

Most of the participants where coming from the Ubicomp/Pervasive world and just two came from the “Web” world.
As one of our goals was to bring the two communities together we definitely see that there is room for improvement on that point (any suggestion? please comment!).

The topics where quite diverse but all discussions really focused on a “Web of Things” being either built using WS-* Webservice (the DPWS folk was well represented) or using REST. The discussions between the two communities were quite constructive and very far from those REST vs WS-* wars.

The workshop definitely did not only focus on those topics but rather started from there and discussed what was missing in those architectures and principles to fully apply them to things. The word cloud below tries to encapsulate the keywords of the presentations and discussions.

As you can see, lot’s of discussions were rotating around missing key features of the current architectures for things. In particular people talked about semantics and discovery of things. Several approaches where proposed. On the one hand-side the WS-* folks presented how DPWS had service discovery mechanisms directly at hand. The REST people explained how microformats (btw, we currently run a little study of Microformats for things to see how Google will register them!) and more generally the semantic Web could push discovery beyond the “discovery by browsing” paradigm of REST for more complex use cases. Sharing through social networks, concentrators such as Pachube or Sensor.Network or the use of a location infrastructure reflected in URLs were also mentioned as a means to better discover relevant smart objects.

The real-time Web was also a hot topic. Thinking about how event-driven protocols could be built and reused (e.g. Twitter, Pubsubhubbub) on the Web to better fit the needs of sensor networks applications.

More network related topics where discussed such as how to solve the mobility of smart objects and the fact that they often connect behind firewalls. Solutions like using reverse HTTP and Yaler where presented. Still in these topics, a number of paper dealt with evaluations of the proposed protocols and architectures (e.g. DPWS, REST, ontologies, etc.) for things. IPv6lowpan also gained momentum during the workshop as a (soon) viable solution to get rid of the Web of Things software gateways bridging non-IP networks with IP networks.

Finally, novel architectures and integration patterns (based on REST or on custom middleware such as SWE) were proposed to create an organized and composable Web of Things.

You’ll find all the papers and most of the presentations on the workshop official Webpage have a look at them, it is definitely part of the material that will influence the future Web of Things!

After WoT
Overall, WoT 2010 was a success, thanks to all the people who participated and made it valuable! Obviously I’m not the most objective person to say that but according to the feedback we got, people definitely enjoyed it and look forward to the next edition. Perhaps the only downside of this first edition was the lack of Web people… we can certainly improve that!

Speaking of which I wanted to get your feedback:
Where (@ what conference?) should WoT 2011 take place? (should it take place?)
Who should drive it?
When should we plan it for?
How do we get more Web people on board?

People where mainly wondering about the scalability of such a system. If an access controller such as SAC was to be implemented for every “thing” how would that scale? We discussed its deployment on platforms such as Google Appengine which are highly scalable. We also talked about distributed versions of SAC.

People also had concerns about the “user-friendliness” of the approach. While using social networks instead of classical Access Control Lists seemed one step towards the right direction people mentioned the importance of being able to share with clusters of people rather than single persons. A feature which is probably going to be supported by most social network APIs sooner or later.

Last but not least we talked about the Social Network Standards. Researchers in the audience all agreed in one voice that OpenSocial was the way forward. Let’s just hope Facebook and Twitter will eventually join…

Anyway, thanks for the good feedback WoT 2010 crowd!
You’ll find the slides below and some more WoT 2010 slides by searching for WoT 2010 on Slideshare.

In any case the video is definitely worth watching. And the guys at Maya Research certainly have good ideas (e.g Interstacks) so check them out. And forgot to say they work with DARPA, which is always a good thing.

Enjoy!

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

Just as Sputnik has done with legendary WRT54g, one can easily develop custom firmware running directly on cheap routers and sell the whole thing as an augmented product. Which is what that they did for offering a web-based management system for public Wi-Fi hotspots. Besides, just having the possibility of hacking directly with the router, allows you to integrate network-level data into your application (think of your router tweeting each time a new device connect and gets an IP address with DHCP). Can I be more explicit? Just get this thing, because at 119$ it’s a steal!

Oh did I mention that this beast has 64 MB Ram, USB 2.0, and a 480 Mhz CPU?

-= CALL FOR PAPERS =-

First International Workshop the Web of Things (WoT 2010)
in conjunction with the 8th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2010), Mannheim, Germany

Website: http://www.webofthings.com/wot/2010

Paper submission deadline: October 18, 2009 November 15, 2009
Notification of acceptance: December 21, 2009
Camera-ready papers due: January 29, 2010

The world of embedded devices has experienced radical changes over the past few years as real-world objects can now easily connect to the Internet. This convergence of physical computing devices (wireless sensor networks, mobile phones, embedded computers, etc.) and the Internet provides new design opportunities and challenges. The Internet of Things has mainly focused on establishing connectivity in a variety of challenging and constrained networking environments, and the next logical step in the evolution in pervasive computing builds on top of network connectivity by focusing on the application layer: how to develop ubiquitous computing applications on top of heterogenous devices? The Web of Things is the vision that brings embedded devices into the Web by using Web standards as application protocol to interact with things. This workshop aims at bringing together the pervasive computing and Web communities to explore the possibilities for using the core principles and technologies of modern Web architecture (e.g., HTTP, REST, Atom, JSON) for seamless integration of things into the Web and developing applications on top of web-enabled devices (physical mashups). Research contributions are solicited in the following areas:

- Web-based interaction patters for embedded devices (streaming, eventing, etc.)
- Applications, deployments, and evaluation of Web of things systems
- Human-things interaction models and paradigms (mobile interfaces, etc.)
- User-oriented, context-aware discovery and dynamic search for the real world
- Web composition and macro-programming models (e.g. mashups)
- Semantic technologies for description of devices and services
- Optimization methods for embedded Web servers and applications
- Security, access control, and physical sharing of physical things on the Web

Since this workshop is the first in this area, the goal is to develop a community in this area and provide an interactive forum for researchers to learn and discuss about existing efforts to enable cross-fertilization. Hence, we expect all attendees to read all workshop papers in advance and to prepare questions for each. Presentations shall specifically highlight and address similarities and differences with other accepted papers. This will help to provide a forum to foster future collaboration, beyond the mere presentation of research results. In order to ensure a high-quality technical session, submissions must cover one of the topics above and should not exceed six (6) IEEE conference format pages. Research papers must be original prior unpublished work and not under review elsewhere as they will be published on the IEEE Digital Library. All submissions will be peer-reviewed and selected based on their originality, merit, and relevance to the workshop. Submission requires at least one author to fully register for PerCom 2010 and to present the paper on-site.

Organizers:
Dominique Guinard, ETH Zurich and SAP Research Zurich
Erik Wilde, UC Berkeley
Vlad Trifa, ETH Zurich and SAP Research Zurich

Program Committee:
Gregor Broll, DOCOMO Communications, Germany
Adam Dunkels, SICS, Sweden
Martin Gaedke, University of Chemnitz, Germany
Stamatis Karnouskos, SAP Research, Germany
Gerd Kortuem, University of Lancaster, UK
Marc Langheinrich, University of Lugano, Switzerland
Thomas Luckenbach, Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS, Germany
Friedemann Mattern, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Alexandros Marinos, University of Surrey, UK
Rene Mayrhofer, University of Vienna, Austria
Tatsuo Nakajima, Waseda University, Japan
Benedikt Ostermaier, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Cesare Pautasso, University of Lugano, Switzerland
Dave Raggett, W3C, USA
Michael Smith, W3C, Japan
Vlad Stirbu, NOKIA, Finland
Inaki Vazquez, University of Deusto, Spain
Agnes Voisard, Fraunhofer ISST, Germany

A short paper I have been wanting to publish for a while here. It is about the Web of Things demonstrator we presented at Pervasive 2009 in Japan, which is based on our Energie Visible project.

Since it is a short paper it does not present ground breaking results but it contains a bit more technical information on how the Plogg Gateway was built and on the resource orientation of the Ploggs. By the way, we finally managed to begin the deployment of the Energie Visible project in our own labs. The goal is to have Ploggs in each room of our lab managed by a small embedded gateway in each room as well. To that we will also add several other devices such as our RESTful Sun SPOTs and finally experiment mashing up these things together.

I’m rather eager to see how much it will influence our colleagues in their everyday consumption… (Vlad, how about you start shutting down your computer once in a while now already ;-P). But I’m even more eager to be able to test the Web of Things concept in a bigger setting! We’ll communicate the results, no worry!
Until then:
Enjoy reading the paper here!

Bibtex:
@inproceedings{dguinard:pervasiveEnergy:2009,
author = {Dominique Guinard and Markus Weiss and Vlad Trifa},
title = {Are you Energy-Efficient? Sense it on the Web!},
year = {2009},
month = may,
booktitle = {Adjunct Proceedings of Pervasive 2009 (International Conference on Pervasive Computing)},
address = {Nara, Japan}
}

Today, once again, somebody was asking me but what is exactly a resource? Well good question! We all know (hem) what an Object is in Object Oriented Programming, we all know (hem HEM, yeah right!) what a service is in Service Oriented Architectures but what is a resource in a ROA?

I had this discussion with a good friend of mine (and a very good OO architect!) let’s name him, Patrik Fuhrer. His answer was that a resource is “information”.

I would extend this definition by mixing it with the definition of Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby (guys I never go anywhere without your book anymore). Inspired from their definition I would say a resource is:

Something, that can and that’s worth, getting a URI and links.

(For the records: updated according to Erik’s comment, used to be: Information, that can and that’s worth, getting a URI and links)

Now what do you think? I’m interested in your definitions. This might seem like a quite un-useful question but actually understanding that can greatly help us know where to stop creating resources.

Let’s say I have RFID tag read by some reader, i.e. an RFID event. Is the time at which the event was taken a resource itself or a part of the “event” resource. Should the information returned be entirely atomic, namely: the RFID event is a resource and every component of it is, in turn a resource. Or should we simply represent the time as part of the event.

Waiting for your input…

Domotics are not yet main stream products you find at Best Buy (or our local equivalent Mediamarkt), and as of today I see this market limited to two personality types: the high-income early adopter that loves technological fads (and can afford them), and the geek (like me) who likes to play around with technology and finds fun to build a twittering house or smart meter. In this first post of a series where I’d like to dig a little in the different aspects of the smart home (whatever that means), I’d like to provide a brief overview of the current state of the art in this field. The basic definition of the Smart House I will use throughout these posts is a set of interconnected devices embedded in a building or a room that make that place smarter (or automated). But what makes a building smart? According to Joe’s post, it is the ability to continuously self-regulate to provide a better living environment for the user, and at the same time minimize energy consumption. I love the way Joe phrased it (I adapted a little his phrasing to make it shorter):

“Continually measuring, analyzing, and acting is what differentiates an audit from sustainability. [..] Making buildings more efficient is not only about data, but you also have to know what to do and how to act on that data.”

Nicely said! It certainly has a real value for buildings and companies to automated their factories and utilities, and many companies have already understood it. But when it comes to particulars, does the smart house really bring something tangible, or is it just a caprice for rich pampered kids? I’d like to propose and discuss in this post the four main reasons why domotics didn’t really take off for end consumers, which are price, applications, standards, and privacy. These devices are quite expensive and it’s definitely not something we really need, indeed, why would anyone want to automate our homes? To provide some answers to this question, I’d like to share with you my list of applications we’d expect from the smart home:

• Entertainment (TV, radio, DVD, music, games, etc)
• Data storage (NAS, or a centralized data repository)
• Security (Door alarms, cameras, passive-infrared detectors)
• Lighting (automated, ambience effects, etc.)
• Utilities monitoring (Water, electricity, Gas, etc)
• HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air conditioning)
• Health Sensors (Nike+iPOD, blood pressure, etc)

This list is certainly not exhaustive, but shows that there are indeed many different things we could dream of in the house of the future (I’ll spare you the business plan argumentation). There are literally thousands of solutions available in each of these, but the big problem is many different standards exist to connect them, and interoperability between all these devices is a must in the smart home.

The main issue for the smart home is the popular beliefs and fear of technology. First appears the issue of privacy (“If the system gets hacked, then people can access the cameras in my house when I take a shower, monitor my whereabouts”, etc..), but also the danger of it (people can lock me inside my building, cut the ventilation, etc) as illustrated by the horror movies about elevators, where a high-tech building goes wild and harms the inhabitants. This is an essential issue that should never be underestimated, and a single technical failure can harm severely the image of the smart home. That’s why I think security should be an essential component for WOT (and neither Dom nor I are security experts . Volunteers, welcome!!

This is just a first post of a series where I’d like to go more into the details of home automation and internet of things. In the next post, I’ll go more in detail about the actual solutions and devices out there, and also focus more onto the different solutions out there to build the necessary infrastructure to build such connected buildings, and that’s where the research fits right in, build such an infrastructure (so that building new apps/solutions is cheap and accessible). More to follow on that soon!

But why?

Because his project Energie Visible has won the Jade Nature award (and 10k chf with it), out of 20 other selected projects! The Jade Nature award recompenses an innovating project in the area of sustainability and protection of the environment. And that’s cool.

That’s awesome news, Dom, CONGRATULATIONS!!!!! It’s very encouraging for our work, and it clearly shows that we’re on the right track to make something so much bigger. If you all clap hands and do a standing ovation for the awesomeness of Dom, we’ll tell you more about it.

Read about it here, or here, or here.

Geetha starts by explaining that people want widgets for very specified tasks, she’s talking about several tasks on the virtual world but then also mentions that we might want to use widgets to control appliances and possibly embedded device (Dom: I agree with her Dom again: but she did not elaborate on this later in the talk).

She introduces the concept of Tasklets, which are task-based web interaction patterns. As an example a Tasklet could be to notify me when XYZ stock gets a value of more than 50, or to notify a fisherman about the forcast of tomorrow for his fishing region. Geetha goes on by presenting an ACM Widget which connects to HP internal library, logs in automatically and downloads the paper specified by keywords.

She explains that we should give to users the power to package these personal, specific tasks into easy-to use widgets. This is basically what the project tries to achieve. Three steps are required to create a widget. First, the system observes user interaction patterns within the browser to extract data (e.g. usernames and passwords to access the digital library, clicks, etc.). Then the user can select zones of the browsed pages to be extracted later on (Dom: some kind of screen-scraping). All this information is then used to compile a Tasklet which can internally reproduce the same actions. The Tasklet can later be run from several devices simply by getting its URL.

In the demonstration she shows how to create a tasklet that gets your horoscope automatically. The process begins in the Tasklet tool which records what the user is doing. The tool also allows for the user to select and extract zones of the currently browsed web page. In our case we select the horoscope. The tool then renders, on the server-side, a Tasklet corresponding to our horoscope. Geetha then shows how the Tasklet can be used on several devices. First she uses it from her desktop, a double-click on the downloaded widget directly displays the right horoscope in our own language. Then she shows how the Tasklet can be rendered by an engine reading the horoscope aloud. She explains that this version could help porting the Tasklet to mobile phones in developing countries.

The beginning of a very nice project, I believe.

Tim starts by talking about the program of www 2009 and in particular he sees that: Search and search optimization has a big place.Advertising science is also appearing as an important topic, which shows the tendency to also study how to efficiently monetarize the Web.The move to the mobile web is also definitely reflected in this year’s program.

He then moves on talking about the changing environment, mentioning the great hardware developments, the ever-growing data set. He also talks about things which remain (and should remain?) the same: the use and active creating of standards, the still very important web of document and the still growing web of communities.

He goes on with more technical concerns, talking about mashups he mentions the fact that we now really need a serious and clean trust system. Decentralized modular installation is also a feature he’d like to see up on the web soon. Just as we get Debian packets (e.g. using aptitude) we should be able to easily download and deploy applications and parts of the Web infrastructure directly from the Web independently of our platform.
Modularity in general is highly important for Tim. He would like to see a more modular Web where features can really be re-used (Dom: Fulllllllllly agree with that )

The next topic is open social networking. He starts talking about the WAP which did not take off because it was not the web, it was an isolated island not quite the Web. Mobile phone really became first class citizens when they actually implemented Web! access. He sees similarities in the was social networks currently behave, Facebook is an island so is Twitter. However, this has started to change. OpenId and more generally transportable identities should enable us to transport our identities and contacts from one island to the other. A tremendously important point for Tim. We should really get our data back!

He then talks about Linked Data which is also important in terms of social identities. Linked Data can help to infer on our social networks as well as on our several identities (Dom: e.g. TimBL is Time Berners Lee is creator of the web, etc.). He further explains that Linked Data is an attempt to extract our knowledge and capture it on the Web. For instance the answer to a question such as “how do you cure cancer” should be captured by organized, linked data on the Web. He would like to see a system appear using which you could extract the semantics of stored data. He takes the example of a relational database system containing company data, having a system that could understand this data and capture the company internal knowledge of that database would be very valuable.

He then talks about social concerns, in the field of privacy we should have systems going beyond simple access control we should also be able to capture acceptable use. For instance a doctor should be able to get access to all my data to save my life but if this doctor is also a friend of mind he should not be able to access this data out of the “saving my life” context.

To conclude Tim explains our role as Web scientists should be to build a platform for others that follow. We should also avoid assume what they are going to use it form. We should focus on our bit, other will do theirs!

The goal of Domenico’s project (Colibrary) is to provide a web API to reuse content in the digital library domain. Domenico’s provides us with a system overview. For books you input an ISBN which is searched for on various book indexes (such as Amazon, etc.) and the Colibrary creates an RDF description of the book. Colibrary provides the same system for publications and papers, it queries databases such as Citeulike, bibsonomy, ACM digital library and creates an RDF description of the publication.

Domenico then elaborates on the main features of Colibrary. It provides a RESTful API which enables developers and people to create applications on top of Colibrary. He further explains that they had to use screen-scrapers since the API of books and papers databases did not provide all the functionality they needed. For instance Amazon did not provide them with a way to query social features related to books, like tags and reviews which Colibrary supports.

Domenico goes on demoing the application. He first searches for an author, the UI directly gives him the ISBN corresponding to this author. Once he selected the correct ISBN he gets an RDF and its visualization on a web page. He can further request for social artefacts for this book like tags and reviews which again, are gathered using screen-scraping. He then shows the use of the API, given a ISBN you can for instance retrieve all the reviews in the RDF format and use this data in your own application.

The API is available for testing on: http://collab.di.uniba.it/Colibrary/books/doc.html and http://collab.di.uniba.it/Colibrary/publications/doc_pubs.html and the client on: http://collab.di.uniba.it/ColibraryClient/
.

Frederic held the last presentation of this year’s MEM 2009. He starts by explaining how mashups often do not really mature. Operation and maintenance is a challenge and is often simply not considered which prevents mashup to turn into real and often-used applications. He explains how he will this paper describe general operational challenges from a provider’s perspective and present dedicated models and processes focusing on providing sufficient service level agreements.

He introduces the CampusMap mashup which helps people finding their way on the university campus. This example is now concretely deployed and thus Frederic can talk about their experience with its deployment. One of the main issue was that several stakeholders are participating (sometimes not consciously) to the final mashup. API providers, system administrators, that Frederic calls “operators” etc. all need to do their job the right way in order for the mashup to keep running.

He explains that a small change by one of the operators, who did not know the existence of the mashup, lead to CampusMap not working anymore. He explains that from an organizational point of view the operators, whenever possible, should be aware and committed to contribute. On the technical side a service level agreement should be agreed upon by at least all the internal operators (i.e. the university IT and general staff in this case).

He described a method to get to this service level agreement. For instance a mashup primary owner should be defined. He also suggest the use of automatic and dedicated monitoring environments controlling that the mashup runs in a correct manner and report when this in not the case. He also suggest pre-testing all external (and internal) service calls in order to see if these comply with the service level agreement. For instance if a service is just too slow on a regular basis it should not be used in the production mashup.

A nice question from the audience was, do you think there is a contradiction between the idea of having SLAs and the supposed “lightweight-ness” of mashups. Frederic explains that it IS a contradiction but in case of the CampusMap mashup it turned out that the mashup was so often used that it needed to get an SLA to ensure quality towards the customers.

Volker is on the scene again, this time demoing RoofTop, a mashup editor for enterprise mashups. Volker compares the steps toward building a mashup to those on the market place: Knowledge, Intention, Contract or Design and Settlement. This is also the way RoofTop is structured.

He starts the demo by explaining how you can search for widgets either by browsing the catalogue or by means of keywords this is the so called-knowledge phase. The next phase is intention, that’s when the user decides on the widget he wants to add to his mashup.
After this we enters the Contract or Design phase where the widgets are arranged and connected on the dashboard space. For instance Volker selects both a Customer Data widget (connecting to a SAP system) and a Google Maps widget. Directly after adding them he can browse the customers and see their location on the map widget. Finally he adds a Google Mail widget which can be used to see mails related to a customer. The last step is the settlement, that’s when the mashup is actually executed and exported.

Finally he shows how context is used to suggest widgets and mashups to users. For instance if you are part of the marketing team and many of the marketing exec used a particular mashup the system is going to recommend you this mashup. Three axis or context features, can be used for recommendations colleagues, environment and business purpose.

You can see a video similar to the demonstration at MEM 2009 on this page.

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 mashup anymore. His solution is to create a contract between the mashups tools (e.g. Yahoo Pipes) and service providers. As a consequence the mashup of two services would also display the ads of each service. He further elaborates on the implementation of such a system and talks about a language construct to support it (see the paper for more details) and shows a concrete example for the Spot-to-Spot transit guide, the public transporation mashup he mentionned earlier.

He explains how this type of “contract” could also help to solve the issues of content “scraping” for instance by Google News. This way, the original editor (e.g. the Times) could still make money out of content displayed by Google News.

Sorry for being away for a while but we are actually preparing content which is going to be here soon! Anyway, that not the purpose of this post which aims at inviting all the Swiss members of WOT to a talk this evening in frame of the webmardi:
http://webmardi.ch/doku.php?id=meetings:2009-04-07-web_of_things

This talk will take place in Fribourg (lovely place to buy cheap but goooood chocolate). It is going to be for a community of hackers and developers and thus we’ll focus it on concrete examples and implementations of the web of things’ concepts.

It’s open to everyone so feel free to join! For those who can’t I’ll upload the slides here afterward.

Update: you’ll find the slides below!

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 the protons can travel up to 99.99% the speed of light thus, people might need to slightly increase the refresh rate of their screen in order to comfortably watch the mashups.

For more information please check the date of this post.

Ramesh Srinivasan from UCLA

What happens when you give technology to other people, who will use it their own way such as fisherman using mobile phones to alert family in case of natural disaster, or people who generate money with mobile phones in Africa. But what does this mean in our world, in our cultures? There are particular ways things are to be used, but people can use them for other purposes, they are locally meaningful.

Ontologies for different cultures, different topics. Wouldn’t there be a common ontology where different ways of looking at our world (and their cultures, history, etc) could be put together in a single representation? On the same Web? How can the digital world can account for the different views to have a single global village. How do we develop system that take into account conflict. Search. Information from what’s in your mind, to what you can find!

Juliana Rotich from Global voices

Problems with blogs, if you’re looking for Kenyan information, you just find safari photos, but not real meaningful content. In different languages. Egyptian blogger that got fined (lost vs a chemical company) because he posted photos of the company polluting. Flashing (phone but cut just before people answer, meaning I run out of credit, plz call me back). Company make money by sending this message and attaching ad at the end of message that reads “please call me back, thank you”.

She insisted on the mobile web, it’s already big and growing hugely, and not only in developing countries. It’s not enough for people to have access to tools, but they need to be educated to know how to use the tools correctly. Aggregation, Localization, innovation. Future will include People + Mobile+ Cloud.

We must write the story before everyone forgets. We can’t just write the story of the Web, as you’d have also to tell the story of hypertext, computers and PC. An early innovator was Vannevar Bush in “As we may think” (1945). Human mind associate things rather randomly. Then Doug Engelbart hypertext, in the 60′s with the first mouse, then at xerox parc people built it. Later paul baran contributed to arpanet, world’s first LAN, based with packet switching (1971). Then Network + Network + Network = Network. The idea was really that several different netws together form the Net. In the 80′s cam the minitel, CEEFAX, Teletext, Viewdata. In France it was different, when you subscribe to phone you can also get access to minitel, which made french much more connected than other european countries at that time. In the 70′s CERNET at CERN was also in place and many people started looking at alternative systems (in particular TCP/IP).

At that moment everything was in place for the Web to appear. Tons of data was available at CERN, but there was no way to associate the data, which was quite frustrating. Tim Berners-Lee (TBL) was interested in reuse the same way as people associate ideas in their minds. In the 1990, initial idea of the web was there he submitted his idea to internet conference, but was promptly rejected. But TBL had to share the idea around, WWWWizards 1993 public domain. He ended his talk with two quotes from TBL:

A lab which pushes the boundaries of technology as a matter of course in every aspect of its everyday work is likely to be the place where you can create a system designed for what to everyone else, is the future.

It’s not what you get out of society that matters, it’s what you put in.

Melanie Rieback: security in ubicomp

RFID & Security, a white hat hacker (paid to break systems). RFID is just the next pace in low-end computing. The IoT is going to inherit all the drawback as the internet. Attack will have a much bigger impact when they are applied to physical objects. Small devices, can’t protect themselves using standard tools, like encryption. You can read now most tags, the ones in public passes, passports. You can copy them easily, or worse, credit card hacked. Wardriving. RFID. Is your cat infected with a computer virus? Especially she wrote a virus for RFID tags. It copies itself into back end system, which is not very appealing for huge logistics system (SAP anyone?!). She tried to convince politicians about doing something about RFID security, but they don’t listen. She build the RFID Guardian, which does audit (penetration tests), and firewall for RFID systems. It’s a handheld security build into a device, it’s a software-controllable fully controllable by radio. Can also do selective RFID jamming of RFID tags, and as well as spoof tags. Now you can build a firewall but for physical, radio queries (based on policies). You can choose what type of query is it, and should be.

Of course, it can be used to hack, DOS , replay attack, relay attacks (defeats almost any cryptography). If somebody, if somebody can send a GSM near somebody who is doing a payment with a NFC payment credit card, this is very bad. Middleware back-end system can be hacked directly through RFID. Finally, can we use it to hack transportation, ccc have been working on that. crapto1 is available published on the web, we just need to implement it into RFID guardian.

Everybody, would think this is just these systems are not just broken, but they’ll be soon brokable by anyobody, as they are starting to sell it soon!

Why do I put these tools into bad guys hands? The bad guys will have the tools that anyway, so let’s put them directly in the good guys hands. If computer people would have access to the right tools, things could be different, and it’s worth thinking about that when deploying large-scale RFID systems.

The video phone started in the 60′s, but it was too expensive (27$ per min). Then other attempts of videophones, but still technology sucked, images were lagging. Now you still have new attempts of the video phone (Asus 2008). Another holy grail is the smart fridge. Good idea to have a screen in the fridge to watch movies or have the net, so people can check recipes. Many smart fridges have been launched, but still they are not really used. Another example is LBS, it’s been 20 years that people tried to find applications for LBS. Technology knows always where you are, but it doesn’t always work, and exceptions (GPS doesn’t find you), these things have problems reaching their markets.

Holy grail of the Smart Fridge (source)

There are a few characteristics in common between these projects. The people who promote them are sincere, but they just leave some essential factors out of the equation. Based on his experience, he tries to explain and analyze the causes of failure.

• When these things are designed, they are located in a special context (historical, social, etc, e.g. rockets in the 60′s). This limits the vision of the world, or biases it. And this limits are being reflected in the design of these things.
• Wrong perception of time, time is not stable. Innovations are slow to happen, but sometime some things just appear (disruptions). Future things, black swans appear, and if you don’t take them into account, you can fail (even though that’s diff).
• Confusion between short and long term. Things change over long time, it’s not that fast. We mistake both.
• Bad understanding of users. We don’t think how people will use tech, and it’s important to think about exceptions, how people use things. We often assume the “average/normal” human. If you think like that, you might miss important factors, which would cause failure.
• Automating rituals. “Where are you?”. We automate this questions, so that it’s done automatically. But this is totally different from sending an sms or calling people to let them know where you are. You might not want people to know where you are any time. Location accuracy should be different for different time.
• Making things more natural. “clippy”, seems more natural to use dialogs to interact with your computer. But what’s natural (in definition), and what’s really natural, there’s a gap between reality and our assumptions of it. For example, sweeping your bag with RFID tag is natural in places, but is it for everbody.

Why are the failures important to analyze?

• Generally they’re good ideas, but just here before their time. For example, videophone was a filaure as a phone, but look at people who use skpye, videophone is a huge success. It was just the wrong shape.
• Failures results in more detailed critique, there are many documenation on things that have failed. It’s a great material for design.

We must learn to spot failures, we need to document them extensively, and turn failure into a design strategy.

In particular, they talk about the Sensor Web, which has nothing to do with our WWW. There is not single mention of URI or HTTP or REST in the whole issue, but there are many articles that talk about the same approaches. I find this quite disappointing, as neglecting the Web as a prime choice for transmitting data makes me sad.

Even though there are many mentions to project such as OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE), it just scratches the surface of what the WOT is really about. SWE is cool indeed, but to me it’s just a GIS/sensors oriented variation of web services. They have many “proprietary” (I always use proprietary for everything that is not widely accepted by at least 20% of Web users) language to describe sensor and their readings, but then why not use standard web services to do it? Or EEML for that matter which is much better, flexible, and extensible? Don’t get me wrong, SWE’s languages are very good for static cases and rigid deployments, I doubt it’s really better than RPC-based good ol’ web services (just that it has lots of things hard-wired to help you if you deal with sensor & geo data).

All of the approaches in the sensor web issue, still do not sound very scalable to me (this is just an assumption, given that I don’t see many people using them). That makes me mad, so many people trying to push their standard, why solution A is better than B, etc. The result is that no one really makes it, and all these standards just end up marginalized. That’s exactly what we want to avoid. The Web of Things is build on that very Web you’re reading this, the Web that’s being used by millions of people daily? Why people think they can just come up with something totally different, hoping that people will start using their better-than-other standard? We propose to reuse as much as possible of what’s out there, and introduce new things just Web protocols won’t suffice (but I don’t don’t really see what can’t be done with web technologies at this point). Let’s hope in the near future, when people will talk about worldwide global network of sensors, they will mention at least the Web as an excellent candidate on which to build it.

Hi all, in preparation for our lift workshop and BoF session we are currently adding community-oriented goodies, thus excuse us if the blog looks weird from time to time, we are just testing. Should be fixed by tonight!

Besides the fact that Lugano is the sunniest place in Switzerland it is for us a pleasure to be invited by Prof. Pautasso. His work on REST architectures and especially on comparing and contrasting REST with WS-* (i.e. SOAP, WSDL, and the like) service has been quite inspiring for us. If I had to select one paper in this field it would certainly be that one: RESTful Web Services vs. Big Web Services: Making the Right Architectural Decision, a paper containing a lot of takeaways in terms of what type of architecture should be used for what purpose.

One of the conclusions of that paper is that REST architectures seem to be more adapted for ad-hoc and tactical applications, such as user mashups. Which leads me to Cesare’s more recent and extremely inspiring (for me a least) focus: Web 2.0 Mashups, like this recent workshop he organized with non-computer-scientists (i.e. normal ) people:

Inspiring work since we are currently building a number of prototypes going towards end-user mashups based on real-world services: what if I could mashup a service offered by my plants with a service offered by my central heating so that the plants can decide on the adequate room temperature while I’m away?

Anyway, in a word like in thousands we really are looking forward to meet Cesare, and we’ll update you on the outcome of the talk and the discussions!

A major burden for people, who want to save energy at home, is for them to identify how much energy is consumed by different appliances. How much does my computer consume in operation / when it is powered off? Is the consumption of my energy-saving lamp significantly lower in the long run than the normal lamp I’ve got there? Such questions are key to understand where energy can be saved without too much effort. Currently available solutions, such as pluggable power monitors, are helpful, but do not fully fit the needs of individuals. They lack demonstrating power such as being able to compare consumption on a centralized screen, in an appealing manner.

In this project we implement a system that’s very simple to set up and that can be used in everyday life. All you need to do is to get a number of Ploggs and plug them on the appliances you want to montior. Then, our software finds all the Ploggs in the environment and makes their functionalities accessible through a dynamic web page as shown below:

The interface offers six real-time graphs. The four graphs on the right side provide detailed information about the current consumption of all the appliances currently available (i.e. attached to a Plogg). The two remaining graphs show the total consumption (KWh), and respectively a comparison (on the same scale) of all the running appliances.

A more geeky description of that system is available in this post.

The software will soon be available for download here so stay tuned!

Anyway, we’re building a platform and will release some code very soon. As soon as we finish prototyping and testing. So that you folks will be able to play with and integrate wherever you can program something (that is in your coffee machine, car, cyber teddy bear, husband, etc). Just keep waiting, but you won’t be disappointed! Just thinking at the cooool stuff we’ve done with it makes me shiver.

Okay, gotta catch some sleep. And stop writing papers and code something.

Soon. Very soon.

First of all, we’re proposing an open stage with the hope to spread the ideas behind the Web of Things to the lift crowd to generate ideas (and hopefully fans!). We plan to release officially the web of things at that moment, and start building a community of people that want to take part in laying the basis of a future web filled with tons of funky devices. Yes, go and vote for the talk, thanks, that was the point of the announcement

Then (and more important), a totally awesome workshop on the future of the internet of things is taking place as well. Thanks to Alexandra Deschamps-Sosino from Tinker.it! for joining us and help organize this workshop. Yes go and vote too, but make sure you’re ready to spend a couple of days after lift putting ice packs on your brain after the conference, because we’re really going to make you folks think really hard.

Finally a birds of feather session will be planned to share ideas and the outcome of our workshop with the LIFT crowd. COME too, it will be awesome!

“NéObjects” – new digital objects, novel kinds on networked devices, all kinds of network structures, and this is a design challenge. He likes the idea of “Mestizo” objects. The design process is about transforming technologies into products and practices, design is what is between these two notions. Also, the different cultures have an effect on the object, Japanese objects are different from European ones.

“Domotics is what you find in a fair, not in a house.”

He shows his work Domus Master/NoMiror, a programmable object that shows things I want him to show. It’s a screen different from other screens. Also discusses Interface(s) and. WaSnake a digital bookshelf that can be programmed, and used as a general interface, that can display all kinds of infos (RSS feedz, etc.). Waaz, an totally cool (mobile tag, you can create your own thing). You just transform a bookshelf by integrating a Tikitag reader. WaPix, 2 photo-frames that are to be connected, which gives a new way to combine souvenirs, gives a néo-old-school touch to your photos. All what he shows have been built on top of open source technologies. He underlines how with open tools such as , designers have been enabled to build technologies, smart, animated objects. The hack of the wii mote hasn’t been done by them, but other people who made it available to them, for free. Wablog, a small device that shows your avatar online and that can be programmed. It’s all about presence, protection, and internet presence. It’s a “machin”, something with no real purpose, but it’s a research step. All of these things are on IP, simple, open, usable, built to be played with.

To design objects, it’s about gut feelings, something that relates to our humanity, feelings. The digital objects and cannot be built by big companies and you need to think about the human who will use them and want to play with it. You need to integrate the open dimension to be reused, change, and then you’re confined to use and consume and get frustrated by them.

The final words: IoT is not science fiction, it’s here. In IoT, there is the word “object” and objects have a logic, a design conception, a long history. But you need to put the good principles in them, such as privacy and people’s fear into the design process. This is an opportunity for the financial crisis and environmental issues. We want to buy Jean-Louis’s objects! So sell cool objects, and make people want to have them, touch them, feel them (did we say iPhone?)!!!!!

Definitely awesome talk, totally worth checking out his work (how the hell didn’t I hear about this genius before?)! I can’t way to get his stuff to play around with, so Jean-Louis, if you read that, please sell these toys soon because you might have a customer here (maybe two?).

Networking has transformed objects, but it didn’t changed the way they are made. The “Internetization” of objects manufacturing, through Fab Labs follows the model of Web 2.0. Open source objects, that you can just download, print and built. This concepts has been already affecting third world countries, where people can built (and share the guidelines) structures, buildings, appliances, etc.

The new business, however, is about the machine to machine communication. Devices that just chat together. For now all integration is done vertically, one application for one user, just like the old days of computers. But the real challenge is about sharing devices accross several users and applications, sharing of infrastructures, devices. This echoes very much with our notion of Web of Things, which is all about. But Daniel goes further, he talks about devices that are share between… no users (that’s the real challenge).

This creates risks, shed lights on sensitve questions. Tracking is cool, but not too much. I like not to lose my cat, or track my shoes when running. But at some point, we don’t want to track too many things. What are the limits? New york shows you a path that minimizes the least filmed path. If everything in my city is tracked, viewed, then it’s problematic. I wanna do sometimes bad things in my city, without being tracked. He also mentions Adam Greenfield, and the design principles he proposed in Everyware. You always need to look more broadly at the IOT, because the potential is much larger than we see and think