Opening presentation of WoT 2016, covering the Web of Things and the path toward Semantic Interoperability

1. 7th International Workshop on the Web of Things (WoT 2016)
November 7, Stuttgart, DE
Simon Mayer, Dominique Guinard, Erik Wilde, Matthias Kovatsch

2. Administrative & Workshop Program
From the Web of Things to Semantic Interoperability

3. Administrative
16 submissions 
18 PC members
49 reviews
7 accepted papers

4. Administrative
Proceedings of WoT 2016
• Still work-in-progress, we’ll be in touch
• ACM will be in touch with the license agreement
• Then we’ll need another “final” camera-ready version from you
Open Demo Session @ 12pm
• Show your demo if you think it’s valuable for the audience!
• Set up during the morning break @ 10:30 (come talk to me!)

5. Workshop Program
9:00 Welcome and Opening (Simon Mayer)
9:30 Always-On Web of Things Infrastructure using Dynamic Software Updating (Martin Alexander Neumann)
10:00 Towards Integration of Big Data Analytics in Internet of Things Mashup Tools (Tanmaya Mahapatra)
10:30 — 11:00 Break
11:00 Towards the Shop Floor App Ecosystem (Andrei Miclaus)
11:30 Adaptive User Interfaces as an Approach for an Accessible Web of Things (Lukas Smirek)
12:00 Open Demo Session
12:30 — 14:00 Lunch
14:00 Introduction: Semantic Interoperability for the Internet of Things (Matthias Kovatsch)
14:30 Hypermedia-driven Socio-technical Networks for Goal-driven Discovery in the Web of Things (Andrei Ciortea)
15:00 Toward Constrained Semantic WoT (Remy Rojas)
15:30 Modeling the Internet of Things: A Foundational Approach (Ram D. Sriram)
16:00 We’re off together to discussions about the future of the Web of Things, semantic interoperability, and
anything that comes up during the workshop at Brauhaus Schoenbruch

6. Workshop Program @ Brauhaus Schoenbruch

7. (WoT accepted papers, 2016)

8. “The Web is good for the IoT”
Uniform Identification, Interaction, Representation model
These enable scalability, robustness, usability, mashup-ability
• Important for the Web (of Documents) and the Web 2.0 (of People)
• Even more important for interacting physical devices in the IoT and UbiComp scenarios!
• Easy to understand, easy to use, easy to debug, lots of language bindings, huge developer base, …
-> efficient to develop WoT applications!
F. D. Davis. Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and User Acceptance of Information Technology, 1989
D. Gefen and M. Keil. The Impact of Developer Responsiveness on Perceptions of Usefulness and Ease of Use, 1998
D. Guinard, I. Ion, S. Mayer: REST or WS-*? A Developers’ Perspective, 2011
L. Popa, P. Wendell, A. Ghodsi, I. Stoica: HTTP: An Evolvable Narrow Waist for the Future Internet, 2012
If you apply REST to physical devices, read this: https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-keranen-t2trg-rest-iot-03.txt

9. A Mashupping Exercise…
UbiComp course @ ETH Zurich 2016, 90 students
Create a mashup of the BART and Yelp APIs
• Max. 1h + Prizes for 1st 2nd 3rd place
• Teams of 2; Any language; Any means (but reference properly)
• SILENT code submission (zip, rename to txt, submit)
“Your application reads a BART station ID (e.g., “dbrk”) from the user. It
looks up the station’s location coordinates using api.bart.gov; It finds the
10 best-rated restaurants around the given station using yelp.com; It
prints each restaurant’s name, category, and rating, sorted by rating.”

10. A Mashupping Exercise…
Solved successfully within 60min by: Felix, Jonathan,
Johnathan*, Dominik, Tobi, Martin, Chris, Andrei*,
Nino*, Dominik, Thomas, Balz, Ingo, Martina, Simon,
Emily, Krisztina, Yongzhe, Mrigya, Daniel*
Cluster of submissions: 56min
4th prize (Nino): 50min
3rd prize (Andrei): 39min
2nd prize (Johnathan): 31min
1st prize (Tobi, Martin): 24min
It takes us about this long to get to the Brauhaus afterwards…

11. A Mashupping Exercise…
If you want others to use your API, it must be easy to use!
• Simple to use: use widespread patterns (e.g., REST) and formats (e.g., JSON)
• High-quality API documentation
• Example code and/or client libraries
These factors make APIs easy to use – for humans!
This is where semantic interoperability comes in
Yay! Simple to use APIs!
What about me??
De-siloing via Webservices (Amazon’s Alexa Voice Services API): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVsCdyjr8Qk

12. Why enable Machines to use APIs
What would the Social Web be if People couldn’t navigate it?
What will the Web of Things be if Devices can’t navigate it?
Key enabler for Autonomous Systems!
Key to overcome IoT Siloization!
If we agree on using the Web as a common
application layer, we at least don’t have to take
care of low-level protocol semantics since these
are defined within REST

13. Example: HATEOAS
Major source of robustness in Web applications
Traditionally not that important
• HATEOAS violations are a nuisance for human users…
• But they are problematic for machines!
HATEOAS (trends.google.com)
“Follow-your-nose”

14. Semantic Interoperability…
Idea: Separating meaning from hard-wired implementation to achieve
cross-device, cross-application, cross-silo understanding
Estimated value (per year, US only):
77bn (Healthcare)1
+ 10bn (Automobile Manufacturing)2
+ 10bn (Construction) 2
+ x (all other fields + rest of world) = worthwhile
1 Health Affairs, Jan 2005
2 NIST, 2008

15. …requires Shared Understanding
Different approaches to sharing common understanding with their strengths and
weaknesses…
H2H: Models can be general, we will fill in the gaps
H2M/M2H: Provide some structure, types, etc.
M2M: Requires precision
• Exchange only – Requires precise shared data models
• Meaningful Interaction – Requires precise shared information models
Slide courtesy of Jack Hodges
implicit -> unstructured -> UML -> RDF -> hard code

16. Is this feasible in practice?
Will we do it if we could?
• “People lie, are lazy, and are stupid”
• They will not create proper metadata even if we had an agreed way of doing it
Are we able to do it?
• Reaching agreement on general concepts is hard
• We live well with imprecise definitions, but machines often cannot…
A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on
self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities [C. Doctorow, 2001]
C. Doctorow, http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm, 2001
C .Marshall, F. Shipman: Which semantic web?, 2003

17. “Sunday 1 January 2006 is the first day of the first week of 2006.”
“No, it is the last day of the 52nd week of 2005”
“Red”
A color
A word
Disagreement
Ambiguity
“John gave Mary the book.”
“She read it.”
“He got a hug.”
Context
ISO 8601

18. Conclusion
Critics question the basic feasibility of
[the Semantic Web], but proponents
argue that applications in industry,
biology and human sciences research
have already proven the validity of the
original concept.
Practical adoption of SemWeb
technologies is further advanced in
“specialized communities” and for
“intra-company projects”
C .Marshall, F. Shipman: Which semantic web?, 2003
I. Herman, State of the Semantic Web, 2008
Firsthere….
Then here…?
Firsthere….
Firsthere….
Firsthere….

19. Steve Deering, Talk at IETF 51, 2001
“Web”
Shared Models
Firsthere….
Then here…?
Firsthere….
Firsthere….
Firsthere….
??

20. Workshop Program
9:00 Welcome and Opening (Simon Mayer)
9:30 Always-On Web of Things Infrastructure using Dynamic Software Updating (Martin Alexander Neumann)
10:00 Towards Integration of Big Data Analytics in Internet of Things Mashup Tools (Tanmaya Mahapatra)
10:30 — 11:00 Break
11:00 Towards the Shop Floor App Ecosystem (Andrei Miclaus)
11:30 Adaptive User Interfaces as an Approach for an Accessible Web of Things (Lukas Smirek)
12:00 Open Demo Session
12:30 — 14:00 Lunch
14:00 Introduction: Semantic Interoperability for the Internet of Things (Matthias Kovatsch)
14:30 Hypermedia-driven Socio-technical Networks for Goal-driven Discovery in the Web of Things (Andrei Ciortea)
15:00 Toward Constrained Semantic WoT (Remy Rojas)
15:30 Modeling the Internet of Things: A Foundational Approach (Ram D. Sriram)
16:00 We’re off together to discussions about the future of the Web of Things, semantic interoperability, and
anything that comes up during the workshop at Brauhaus Schoenbruch

21. 7th International Workshop on the Web of Things (WoT 2016)
November 7, Stuttgart, DE
Simon Mayer, Dominique Guinard, Erik Wilde, Matthias Kovatsch