In the Web of Things initiative, we propose to make smart things first-class citizens of the World Wide Web. This allows to apply widely used Web mechanisms (bookmarking, browsing,...) to things and to use physical devices just like any other service on the Web. In the talk, some of the prototypes that we have been building in our lab are presented. We also ask what will be the "next big thing" in connecting and mashing up real-time, real-world services.

1. Web-based Smart Things Ecosystems
ICiS Physical Computing Workshop [Park City, July 2011]
Simon Mayer [simon.mayer@inf.ethz.ch]
Distributed Systems Group, ETH Zurich

2. smart things ecosystems...
Wednesday, 20th July 2011 ICiS Physical Computing Workshop [Park City, July 2011] 2

3. The Web of Things: Quick rundown
+ Internet Connection [IPv6] + Embedded Web server
+ Resource-Oriented Modelling (REST)
[IPv6] Hui, J.W., and Culler, D.E.: IP is dead, long live IP for wireless sensor networks. (2008)
Wednesday, 20th July 2011 ICiS Physical Computing Workshop [Park City, July 2011] 3

4. Representational State Transfer (REST)
Addressable, linked resources
[http://vs.inf.ethz.ch/wot/sunspots/spot1/sensors]
Defined set of operations (uniform interface)
[PUT «on» /sunspots/spot1/actuators/leds/led1]
Representations & Content Negotiation
[HTML for humans, JSON for machines,…]
Fielding, R.T.: Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures
Richardson, L., and Ruby, S.: RESTful Web Services
Wednesday, 20th July 2011 ICiS Physical Computing Workshop [Park City, July 2011] 4

5. The Web of Things: REST benefits
 Great for open, interoperable APIs [http://derekskeba.com]
 Greatly facilitates building of physical mashups
 Web features for free
 Bookmark your devices and their functionality
 Caching for scalability, security mechanisms
 Seems to facilitate application development
 People are used to the Web and its resources and links!
Wednesday, 20th July 2011 ICiS Physical Computing Workshop [Park City, July 2011] 5

6. The Web of Things: RESTful Sun SPOTs
I’d love to see a demo!
[http://www.sunspotworld.com]
Wednesday, 20th July 2011 ICiS Physical Computing Workshop [Park City, July 2011] 6

7. The People’s Web of Things
I don’t have a PhD in computer
science...1
Enable tech-savvy users to develop applications
[«programming the real world»]
1 Non-PhD-Nabaztag idea: Dom Guinard
Wednesday, 20th July 2011 ICiS Physical Computing Workshop [Park City, July 2011] 7

8. The People’s Web of Things
 Facilitate the integration of things into the web
 AutoWoT toolkit [code.google.com/p/autowot]
 Facilitate the composition of RESTful services
 Clickscript (visual programming) + Web of Things modules
Mayer, S., Guinard, D., Trifa, V., Facilitating the Integration and Interaction for the Web of Things
Wednesday, 20th July 2011 ICiS Physical Computing Workshop [Park City, July 2011] 8

9. The Social Web of Things
 Sharing of physical and digital artifacts
Guinard, D., Fischer, M., Trifa, V.,: Sharing Using Social Networks in a Composable Web of Things
Wednesday, 20th July 2011 ICiS Physical Computing Workshop [Park City, July 2011] 9

10. The Social Web of Things
@home Sharing your energy consumption
Encouraging energy savings…
@work Laboratory automation
“You may monitor my mass spectrometer”
@business Sharing the trace of tagged products
RESTful EPCIS
Wednesday, 20th July 2011 ICiS Physical Computing Workshop [Park City, July 2011] 10

11. The Businesses’ Web of Things
 Electronic Product Code Information System (EPCIS)
 Dashboard & Mashups based on RESTified API
Guinard, D., Floerkemeier, C., Sarma, S.: Cloud Computing, REST and Mashups to Simplify RFID Application Development and Deployment
Wednesday, 20th July 2011 ICiS Physical Computing Workshop [Park City, July 2011] 11

12. The next big thing(s) in smart things environments
Real-Time Web
Service Discovery
Scaling Up
Wednesday, 20th July 2011 ICiS Physical Computing Workshop [Park City, July 2011] 12

13. Real-Time Web: Beyond pure Client-Server?
 Client-server paradigm not natural for sensing applications
 Sensor push required
 Beyond Atom/RSS: Short-polling, Long-polling
 HTML5 WebSockets – remedy?
 HTML 5 specifications, increasing browser support
 Supported: Chrome 4 & Safari 5 (+ iOS 4.2)
 Disabled by default: Firefox 4 & Opera 11
[www.webofthings.com]
Wednesday, 20th July 2011 ICiS Physical Computing Workshop [Park City, July 2011] 13

14. Service Discovery: Smarter Things?
 Adding semantics for service discovery
 RDF, Microformats, Microdata (www.schema.org!)
 Yummly for smart things 
...and tell others!
 Auto-plumbing for physical and digital artifacts
 Make things just smart enough to know what they can (basically) do…
 Syntactic level (e.g., data type)
 Semantic level?
 User-supported mashing up of services in smart things ecosystems!
 Automatic mashup creation? Feasibility?
Wednesday, 20th July 2011 ICiS Physical Computing Workshop [Park City, July 2011] 14

15. Scaling Up: Global-scale Service Lookup?
 Find services offered by Web-enabled resources
 Globally, but with emphasis on nearby things!
 Location
 Geometric: GPS
 Symbolic: places hierarchy
 A location-aware management infrastructure for smart things?!
Trifa, V., Guinard, D., Mayer, S.: Leveraging the Web for a Distributed Location-aware Infrastructure for the Real World
Wednesday, 20th July 2011 ICiS Physical Computing Workshop [Park City, July 2011] 15

16. Acknowledgements
Web of Things team @ ETH Zurich
Dominique Guinard, Vlad Trifa, Benedikt Ostermaier, Matthias Kovatsch
Christian Floerkemeier, Mathias Mueller, Mathias Fischer
Wednesday, 20th July 2011 ICiS Physical Computing Workshop [Park City, July 2011] 16

17. More References...
1. Pautasso, C., Zimmermann, O., Leymann, F.: Restful web services vs. "big"
web services: making the right architectural decision, WWW '08
2. Guinard, D.: Mashing up Your Web-Enabled Home, Touch the Web 2010
3. Guinard, D., Fischer, M., Trifa, V.: Sharing Using Social Networks in a
Composable Web of Things, Proc. of the First IEEE International Workshop
on the Web of Things (WOT2010). Mannheim, Germany, March 2010
4. Mayer, S., Guinard, D.: An Extensible Discovery Service for Smart Things
… and have a look at our other papers at http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/publ/
Wednesday, 20th July 2011 ICiS Physical Computing Workshop [Park City, July 2011] 17