Andrei Ciortea

Reconsidering the social web of things: position paper

The notion of a Social Web of Things (SWoT) appears in recent works at the convergence of the Social Web and the Web of Things. In our vision, a third dimension is needed: pro-activeness. We propose to extend and transform social networks by integrating autonomous and proactive things. In this paper, we discuss the evolution of the Web on several dimensions, leading to our vision for the SWoT. We discuss the challenges that need to be addressed, a possible approach for addressing them and we illustrate the applicability of the SWoT through a motivating scenario.

Responsive Decentralized Composition of Service Mashups for the Internet of Things

Applications envisioned for the Internet of Things (IoT) would generally have to fulfill their design goals by mashing up devices and digital services in a manner that is both flexible, such that they can adapt to dynamic environments, and responsive, such that they can react to sensor and user input in a timely fashion. Most existing approaches for the development of IoT applications rely on precompiled mashups that are highly responsive, but inflexible due to their static nature. At the other end of the spectrum, fully automatic composition of services results in IoT mashups that are highly flexible, but responsive only for small numbers of IoT services. This paper presents a middle ground approach: goal-driven software agents are equipped with precompiled mashups and cooperate with one another to compose their mashups at runtime in pursuit of their goals. Agents are interconnected via relations that enable them to discover and interact with one another in a flexible manner. To support our approach, we provide an open-source platform that facilitates application development. We used this platform to implement a realistic IoT application that achieves its design goal by mashing-up multiple heterogeneous devices at runtime. Evaluation results suggest that applications remain responsive when scaling to many devices and for relatively large mashup compositions.

Give Agents Some REST: Hypermedia-driven Agent Environments

To keep up with current technological developments, the engineering of multi-agent systems (MAS) has to provide solutions to: (i) support large scale systems, (ii) cope with open systems, and (iii) support humans in the loop. In this paper, we claim that the World Wide Web provides a suitable middleware for engineering MAS that address these challenges in an integrated manner. Even though approaches to engineer Web-based MAS have already been explored in the MAS community, existing proposals do not achieve a complete integration with the Web architecture. We approach this problem from a new angle: we design the agent environment as a hypermedia application. We apply REST, the architectural style of the Web, to introduce a resource-oriented abstraction layer for agent environments that decouples the application environment from its deployment context. Higher-level environment abstractions can then be implemented on top of this lower-level abstraction layer. To demonstrate our approach, we implemented a multi-agent application for the Internet of Things in which software agents can seamlessly navigate, use and cooperate in an environment deployed over multiple Web services (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) and constrained devices.

Open and Interoperable Socio-technical Networks

Developing applications across the physical-digital space requires the homogeneous interconnection of people, physical devices, services and various data sources as first-class entities of complex socio-technical systems. In this paper, we describe socio-technical networks (STNs) as the building blocks of a semantic, open and distributed Social Web of Things. We address the problem of enabling autonomous non-human agents as participants in an open set of STNs. Our approach is to provide agents with machine-readable descriptions of STNs, of operations required for participating in such systems, and of supported implementations for those operations. Towards this aim, we present the STN ontology and we illustrate its applicability. Even though the STN ontology is a work in progress, using the core concepts and properties described in this paper we are able to create concrete specifications of STN platforms. We discuss the positioning of this ontology with respect to several well-known and related vocabularies.