WoTKit: a Lightweight Toolkit for the Web of Things
Blackstock wo t 2011
1. Uniting Online Social Networks
with Places and Things
Mike Blackstock, Rodger Lea
University of British Columbia
Adrian Friday
Lancaster University
2. Key Trends Leading to a Social WoT
• The IoT unites the physical and digital world
• Cooltown and other large scale pervasive
computing systems
• Leverage web standards toward the Web of
Things
• Today social networks are user-centric and social
• User interaction and updates
• Trusted relationships
• User generated content
10. Outline
• Common and unique features of online
social networks
• Current work linking OSNs with WoT
• Challenges toward stronger integration
• Current work and conclusions
11. Key Features of OSNs
• Facebook
• Simple and consistent https://graph.facebook.com/me
REST API {
"id": "69...........",
• Notifications to certain
"name": "John Doe",
"first_name": "John",
"last_name": "Doe",
changes
"gender": "male",
"locale": "en_US"
• Container for canvas
}
https://graph.facebook.com/me/likes
applications
12. Key Features
• Open Social
• Open specification
• Multiple compliance levels:
• basic connectivity to Social API Server
and Gadget Container
• Twitter
• Focus on followers, tweets and search
14. OSN-WoT Related Work
• Foursquare, Latitude: location and check
ins with mobile devices
• Pachube: share, store, find feeds on the
web
• Social Access Controller: users and
groups for sharing things
• SENSE-SATION: OAuth and REST for
participative apps
• SenseShare: facebook for sharing sensors
15. Stronger OSN-WoT Integration
• Stronger convergence
• brings new opportunities for interaction
between users, places and things
• Issues include
• Two way OSN-real world interaction
• Extending APIs and Programming Models
• User interface and human interaction
16. Two-way OSN to Real World
Interaction
• Receive state updates and control things
• Dynamic thing-to-user and thing-to-place
relationships that mirror the world
• Registration and discovery of things
17. Two-way Interaction Challenges
• Data integrity and timeliness
• consistent for all OSN users, update order is
important
• remote control and automation should be possible
• subscribe or follow thing and relationship updates
• how should things connect?
• via gateways or individually?
• is OAuth suitable when there is no UI on a thing?
• is it practical for users to individually connect and
authenticate everything they own?
18. Extending Programming Model
• Extend APIs and models to include places,
and things
• physical and ownership relationships
• For example:
• Facebook Graph extensions
• New Open Social Services
• Twitter feeds for data from environments
19. Programming Model Questions
• Location models and other meta data
• ‘Thing profiles’: folksonomies vs standard profiles
and interoperability
• How to deploy an API extensions?
• Open Social extensions: not popular
everywhere
• Facebook: propretary and closed
• Can we use existing hooks and extension
points? Social network overlay?
20. Human Interaction Challenges
• OSN user interfaces for interacting with
places and things
• new container applications?
• Allow users to qualify relationships
• more than just ‘friend’, ‘follow’ and ‘like’
relationships
• Installations presenting OSNs in physical world
• bridge social networks with physical space
• interaction using situated sensors, actuators
and displays
• can public benefit while maintaining privacy
and autonomy?
21. Current work
• Facebook applications for sensors and
actuators
• A “meta” social network integrating
Facebook, Twitter, Open Social & others
• Can experiment with new APIs and
interfaces.
• Interactive Community Displays
• social network displays in cafes
• tagging places and things
• used to initiate discussion and socializing
22. Conclusion
• The Web of Things leveraged pioneering work in
ubicomp and pervasive computing
• Leveraging and extending Online Social Networks can
create a social WoT.
• To accomplish this:
• Enable two way interaction for dynamic place & thing
discovery and state
• Extend OSN APIs to include places, things and
relationships
• Extend user experience in both directions for real
world user interaction with OSNs
User identification and profile\nTrusted connections to friends and content\nUser interface containers\nUniform namespace and APIs\nSecurity: OAuth\nUser activity feeds\n
