Smart cities and the Web of Things at the Media Web Symposium
Fraunhofer FOKUS are once again hosting the Media Web Symposium, which will be held in Berlin on 14-15 March 2013. The first day is devoted to workshops and the second to plenary sessions. The focus will be on connected TVs, multiscreen interaction, the Internet as the new broadcasting channel, search, and the role of Web technologies in Smart Cities and the Internet of Things. I am giving two talks:
- Smart cities as a web of people, things and services
- Expanding the Web beyond desktop and mobile to the Web of Things
Web technologies hold out the promise of making it easier to create services for the Internet of Things with a reduced learning curve and lowered costs compared to native platform development. This depends on the use of overlay networking to decouple applications and services from things best dealt with at a lower layer.
Some examples of personal services include savings on utility bills through smart meters, extended warranty services for home devices with preventative maintenance based upon access to sensor data, home security for peace of mind, and home healthcare for a better quality of life, improved outcomes and reduced overall costs. Personal services require careful treatment of privacy. Public services make use of publicly accessible sensors and anonymised data. Examples include information on public transport systems, and directions to free parking spaces.
Dave,
I have noticed your suggestion to create a Web of Things community at the end of your slides.
Can I invite you to liaise with the existing community groups, in particular the Semantic Sensor Network community group http://www.w3.org/community/ssn-cg/ and the Web of Sensors community group http://www.w3.org/community/sensorweb/ ?
The primary intent of the SSN-CG is to be the place where we will continue the work done in the Semantic Sensor Network Incubator Activity - which I co-chaired: for more information, see the SSN XG report published in June 2011).
There has been new developments since the end of the XG e.g. the work done on the publication of a sensor data cube via the Linked Data API the but also several attempts to extend the SSN Ontology to cover richer Internet of Things requirements. Several members of the community have also been involved in EU IoT standardisation events like the Future Internet assemblies).
The question today is "How can we extend of the open web platform with sensors/things APIs AND plug in the value-adding semantics needed by content-rich applications (e.g. Web and TV or Mobile apps) - see for example the Smart Cities mashups submitted at last year Semantic Web Challenge @ISWC)?.
If you think, this is the right time for a proposal to federate these activities at W3C, can I re-iterate my invitation to discuss the best way forward via our public-ssn-cg mailing list?
Regards
Laurent
Hi Laurent, yes, the plan is indeed to liaise with existing groups both within W3C and elsewhere, including relevant research projects such as Compose. I look forward to a fruitful collaboration. Payam Barnaghi has already volunteered to help with this on behalf of the Semantic Sensor Networks community group. At this point the idea is to discuss the scope and objectives for the Web of Things community group, and this is a good opportunity to identify relevant groups to liaise with. Your suggestions would be very welcome.