Vincent Toubiana

The Web of things vision: Things as a service and interaction patterns

This paper presents our vision of the Web of Things, where real world objects and cloud services interact through the web. In this prospect, mechanisms to embody object-as-a-service, along with novel navigation and interaction paradigms are needed to enable common physical objects in the surroundings to be considered as new stakeholders in traditional web applications.

Providing user support in Web-of-Things enabled smart spaces

With the proliferation of connected devices, ubiquitous computing success now depends on the availability of tools and interfaces to support users in connected environments. We present a platform realizing ambient intelligence concepts that empower users in the context of Smart Spaces based on the Web of Things. This platform adopts RESTful principles to expose connected resources and defines i) a development framework to host and publish objects, ii) user interfaces and semantic based tools to find and compose real world objects iii) an application model with a set of ontologies to consume them. Our approach permits fast and simple deployments of Smart Spaces composed of Web enabled objects. With the clear objective of confronting our approach to end users, we implemented a set of user interfaces to navigate within Smart Spaces and tools to intuitively design mashups composing real world resources. We present these user support mechanisms through a semantic engine component as well as a set of browsing modalities.

A Semantics to Define Web Templates for Adaptive Ubicomp Applications

The Web of Things (WoT) refers to the extension of the Web to network-capable everyday objects, and revolves around using Web technologies to realize ubiquitous computing environments. In this vision, recent Web platforms allow developers to create ubicomp applications under the form of Web mashups triggering aforementioned objects. However, by requiring a list of such objects to be selected by a developer when being created, these mashups are intrinsically unable to adapt to the dynamics of a ubicomp environment i.e. where objects moves, become unavailable, etc. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by introducing application templates that users roaming across connected environments can configure with smart space resources. We focus here on defining a formal semantics allowing both these application templates to describe their requirements and objects to express their capabilities. We further present how processing such semantics provides guidance to a user configuring an application template, by proposing the best candidate resources for a given situation. We present first experimentation results on the performance of the chosen approach, before discussing further directions.