Aitor Gómez-Goiri

Otsopack: Lightweight semantic framework for interoperable ambient intelligence applications

In Ambient Intelligence environments machines proactively and transparently work on behalf of humans. The nature of these machines and the communication protocols they use is multifarious. Therefore, the applications running on top of them remarkably demand interoperability. The Triple Space Computing (TSC) paradigm addresses that problem by sharing information represented in a semantic format through a common virtual space. As long as application developers use standard ontologies, different applications using the same spaces will interact automatically. The focus of this paper is to present Otsopack, a fully distributed TSC middleware designed to meet the needs of mobile and resource constrained devices. Otsopack defines a simple HTTP interface for the TSC operations. This interface focuses on simplicity and modularity, so that two implementations that support different modules can still interact. To assess the middleware we provide time and load measurements, and we analyze two independent implementations.

A triple space-based semantic distributed middleware for internet of things

In the Internet of Things several objects with network capabilities are connected over a self-configured local network with other objects to interact and share knowledge. In this context, the Triple Space approach, where different processes share common semantic knowledge, seems to fit perfectly. In this paper we present our progress towards a semantic middleware which allows the communication between a wide range of embedded devices in a distributed, decoupled and very expressive manner. This solution has been tested in a stereotypical deployment scenario showing the promising potential of this approach for local environments.

On the complementarity of triple spaces and the Web of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables communication among real-world things and devices through Internet. So far, IoT research has focused on allowing such communication through different protocols and architectures. Some of these architectural approaches are Web of Things (WoT) and Triple Space (TS) which are both resource oriented architectures. This work analyses and compares both approaches and outlines the scenarios in which they will be more useful. Particularly, it outlines how some of the drawbacks of WoT in the discovery and cooperation aspects may be complemented by integrating with TS.

Lightweight user access control in energy-constrained wireless network services

This work introduces a novel access control solution for infrastructures composed of highly constrained devices which provide users with services. Low energy consumption is a key point in this kind of scenarios given that devices usually run on batteries and are unattended for long periods of time. Our proposal achieves privacy, authentication, semantic security, low energy and computational demand and device compromise impact limitation on a simple manner. The access control provided is based on user identity and time intervals. We discuss these properties and compare our proposal to previous related work.

Assessing Data Dissemination Strategies within Triple Spaces on the Web of Things

The upcoming of the Web of Things initiative has improved the integration of Internet-connected devices through the standard HTTP protocol and other web techniques. Unfortunately, it usually defines the data shared by these devices in a syntactic level, showing a lack of expressiveness. During the last decade, the Semantic Web (SW) has aimed to solve these problems by adding logic to the Web to make it machine-understandable and by therefore enhancing the interoperability of the applications using it. The SW is used in the Triple Space Computing paradigm, which proposes a blackboard model where semantically described knowledge is shared between different devices in a completely Restful, and consequently WoT compliant, manner. This paradigms shared blackboard can be implemented using many strategies, from centralized to completely distributed. In this work, we compare and analyze the behaviors of these two extreme cases in several simulations which try to represent common IoT scenarios. Finally, we propose an improvement of the completely distributed strategy by enabling the gossiping between devices.

Distributed Tracking System for Patients with Cognitive Impairments

The increase of life expectancy has arisen new challenges related with the amount of resources required to attend elderly people with cognitive disabilities. These requirements, such as medical staff and financial resources, have been multiplied in the last years, and this tendency will continue in the forthcoming ones. In order to reduce these requirements, the introduction of new technologies will be a key aspect. In this paper we propose a test-question-based memory game that collects the answers given by patients and facilitates access to this information to caregivers and relatives.

Easing the Mobility of Disabled People in Supermarkets Using a Distributed Solution

People’s impairments cause a wide range of difficulties in everyday tasks. Particularly, handicapped people face many challenges both at home, but especially outside it, where their reduced mobility is a burden. Buying in a supermarket can be sometimes troublesome for them and so as to facilitate this task, a product locator application is proposed. This application runs on heterogeneous personal mobile devices keeping the user private information safe on them, and it locates the desired products over each supermarket’s map.

Collaboration of sensors and actuators through Triple Spaces

In recent years, projects and initiatives under Internet of Things have focused mainly on establishing connectivity in a variety of challenging and constrained networking environments. Hence, a promising next step should be to build interaction models on top of this network connectivity and thus focus on the application layer, i.e. how to achieve useful aggregated functionality out of these Internet-connected ecosystems of sensors and actuators. This work analyses the adoption of Triple Spaces coordination language by very heterogeneous and resource-constrained devices and outlines how its primitives can help to develop fully distributed and very decoupled scenarios.

RESTful triple spaces of things

The demand for Internet-enabled objects which expose their content in a RESTful and web compliant manner is increasing. Consequently, these objects have to face well-known problems from the web world. The lack of expressiveness and human orientation of the syntactically described capabilities and contents of those resources is one of these difficulties. The Semantic Web on the contrary interlinks each objects data to one another, enabling its automatic process to reveal possible new relationships and therefore enhancing the interoperability of semantic-enabled objects. In this work we present a semantically enabled Web of Things compliant HTTP interface for Internet-enabled objects which uses Triple Spaces (TS) as a basis. Specifically, we address the adoption of this paradigm by a wide range of resource constrained devices assessing the feasibility of our middle-ware solution, focusing both on the web and on the semantic aspects. Besides, we stress the degree of interoperability achieved by the applications made using RESTful TS by describing two scenarios where it could be used.

wCloud: Automatic generation of WebLab-Deusto deployments in the Cloud

Educational remote laboratories are software and hardware tools that allow students to remotely access real equipment located in universities as if they were in a hands-on-lab session. Since most remote labs share certain management tasks (authentication, Learning Analytics, scheduling, etc.), software systems implementing them on top of which remote labs could be implemented were developed and called Remote Lab Management Systems (RLMS). A key feature provided by certain RLMSs is sharing a remote laboratory between two systems deployed in two institutions. This way, it becomes possible to have multiple RLMS instances (which are pure software) in a Cloud environment, customized for different schools or universities. Each school would have its own RLMS, with all the management features (e.g., managing its own students), and in the end, the RLMS would connect to the RLMS which has the physical equipment. The focus of this contribution is to detail how this “RLMS as a Service” is being implemented in the case of WebLab-Deusto as part of the mCloud project, from a technical point of view.