Antonio Pintus

Humanizing the Internet of Things - Toward a Human-centered Internet-and-web of Things

This paper envisions how the Internet of Things (IoT) complements the Internet of People to build a humancentered Internet-and-Web of Things. The Internet of Things should go beyond the Machine-to-Machine paradigm and must include people in its foundation, resulting in a “Humanized Internet of Things (H-IoT)”. Starting from a relevant work of Fiske, this paper defines how the Human-centred Internet of Things can embed the Fiske patterns in this particular domain. An analysis of some of existing IoT platforms and projects is also presented with the aim to analyse how real implementations are in the same direction of such

SocIoTal — The development and architecture of a social IoT framework

This paper presents the development and architecture of the SocIoTal platform. SocIoTal is a European FP7 project which aims to create a socially-aware citizen-centric Internet of Things infrastructure. The aim of the project is to put trust, user-control and transparency at the heart of the system in order to gain the confidence of everyday users and developers. By providing adequate tools and mechanisms that simplify complexity and lower the barriers of entry, it will encourage citizen participation in the Internet of Things. This adds a novel and rich dimension to the emerging IoT ecosystem, providing a wealth of opportunities for the creation of new services and applications. These services and applications will be able to address the needs of society therefore improving the quality of life in cities and communities. In addition to technological innovation, the SocIoTal project sought to innovate the way in which users and developers interact and shape the direction of the project. The project worked on new formats in obtaining data, information and knowledge. The first step consisted of gaining input, feedback and information on IoT as a reality in business. This led to a validated iterative methodology which formed part of the SocIoTal toolkit and a best practices guide for local policy makers and cities.

Design and Implementation of a Cloud-Based Platform for Unleashing the Personal and Communal Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) concept has attracted a lot of attention in recent years and it is foreseen as one of the technologies that will leverage the Future Internet. It is seen as a major enabler of novel applications and services that will foster efficiency and will ease every day’s life. However, current IoT solutions are mainly focusing on the development of centralized solutions that do not promote the democratization of the IoT but rather concentrate the IoT around a set of cloud-based platforms which pretend to be open but limit the capacity of the people to tailor their Personal and Communal IoT. This paper describes a software platform based on available generic enablers as defined by the FIWARE initiative. It extends the existing architecture models to accommodate the requirements stemming from the vision of people-sourced IoT devices which are shared to create applications and services in smart communities where the owners of the shared devices are always empowered to control who, and in which circumstances, has access to the shared information.

Scripting a Smart City: The CityScripts Experiment in Santander

This paper describes a work-in-progress programming experiment where the playground is an entire city. Based on the SmartSantander FIRE infrastructure, the City Script project is aimed at integrating and experimenting a Web of Things scenario in which sensors and actuators in the city have a digital counterpart and can eventually used to compose mashups with social networks and other digital online sources of data.

Mobile Lessons Using Geo-Referenced Data in e-Learning

We coined the term “mobile lesson” for courses held outside of a classroom. During these courses, all actors are mobile. Themes tackled in such lessons are as varied as geophysics and mineralogy in geography, monuments in history, trees and ecosystems in biology, or distance measuring in physics and geometry, dialects in linguistics... Mobile lessons are not a new teaching technology or strategy, but new mobile devices may render it more efficient and more attractive. We believe that going on the field, looking for information and above all observing actual phenomenon, therefore acting in a more personal and autonomous way, are really helping students to build their knowledge.

Web Architecture of a Web Portal for Reliability Diagnosis of Bus Regularity

In high frequency transit services, bus regularity—i.e., the headway adherence between buses at bus stops—can be used as an indication of service quality, in terms of reliability, by both users and transit agencies. The Web architecture is the entry point of a Decision Support System (DSS), and contains an environment designed for experts in transport domain. The environment is composed of tools developed to automatically handle Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) raw data for measuring the Level of Service (LoS) of bus regularity at each bus stop and time interval of a transit bus route. The results are represented within easy-to-read control dashboards consisting of tables, charts, and maps, able to perform fast AVL processing and easy accessibility in order to reduce the workload of transit operators. These outcomes show the importance of well-handled and presented AVL data, in order to use them more effectively, improving past analysis done by using, if any, manual methods.

Using the Web of Data in Semantic Sensor Networks

In this paper we investigated new methods of effectively performing data modelling for making Internet of Things information accessible to humans and machines. In the current era of technology, we need efficient methods and solutions able to structure, annotate, share and make sense of the IoT data. We assumed that Things are basically active participants in information processes by exchanging data and information “sensed” about the environment. Semantics provide unambiguous machine-interpretable descriptions for data related to Things. In our methodology we proposed to encode sensor and observation data annotations through Semantic Web technologies and to embed them within devices. Moreover, we transformed such annotations to semantic descriptions, by using the cloud-based ThingSpeak middleware. The obtained descriptions are expected to compound a shared RDF Knowledge Base, useful to improve integration and communication processes between different networks.

Designing peer-to-peer systems for business-to-business environments

This paper describes the design of a peer-to-peer system integrated in a larger framework for the automatic content production, formatting, distribution and delivery over multiple platforms called AXMEDIS (E.U. IST-2-511299). One of the goals of the project is the reduction of costs and, among the others, the adoption of a collaborative environment based on a virtual database as an abstraction of a multitude of objects shared in a large network of content producers/distributors/aggregators. The peculiar properties of this system are the automation of P2P related operations, the professional query user interface based on Dublin Core and available rights of target objects, and the preemptive exclusion of uncertified participants.