ASAWoO

The Web of Things (WoT) aims at interconnecting network-enabled appliances using Web standards. However, Web protocols and languages are not adapted to those connected objects. There is also an emerging need for usages of meaningful services relying on interoperable objects. The major challenge of the ASAWoO project is to enhance appliance integration into the Web. Our project builds an architecture to provide users with understandable functionalities under the form of WoT applications, while enabling collaboration between heterogeneous physical objects. To reach this objective and guarantee our solution verifies additional properties, we combine advances from complementary disciplines: Semantic Web to reason about knowledge models; Service-Oriented Architectures to enable interoperability and scalable deployment from home environments to big organizations; Context-Aware Computing to make situation-based multi-level decisions, Multi-Agent Systems to enable autonomous collaboration between objects; Delay-Tolerant Networks to enable disconnection-tolerance for mobile objects; and Cloud Computing to enable minimize global power consumption through Green-IT and Green-by-IT awareness. In addition, our solution protects sensitive information carried by appliances through Privacy-awareness mechanisms. Our project embeds each physical object into an avatar that exposes physical functionalities as semantic Web services, supports optimized communication and code deployment, proposes collaborative functionalities with other avatars, and dynamically adapts the preceding points to changing situations. The project addresses several scientific locks: - provide an energy-aware cloud infrastructure to manage the lifecycle of WoT architectures supporting WoT application deployment - enable autonomous, collaborative avatar behavior, semantic description, discovery and composition of object capabilities, and context adaptation at the object, communication and functionality levels - design and implement energy- and privacy-aware interaction protocols and disruption-tolerant routing protocols for WoT objects - enable avatar/object protocol negotiation The ASAWoO project is organized in 8 tasks. First, Task 1 validates the interfaces and tools to be used in the project. Then, in parallel, Tasks 2, 3 and 4 respectively define the object architecture, cloud infrastructure and context-aware reasoning mechanisms. Task 5 focuses on semantic functionalities. Finally, Tasks 6 and 7 devise communication mechanisms and develop collaborative behavior. All along the project, Task 8 handles management and dissemination activities. We envision several benefits from the ASAWoO project. Our WoT infrastructure will provide a scalable, out-of-the-box framework enabling high-level interaction with sets of heterogeneous objects via the deployment of Web of Things applications. Moreover, the tasks deliverables represent independent advances in their domains. Assistance robots and co-workers (co-Bots) will be a major market in a near future. This project is an opportunity for vendors like Génération Robots to occupy a strategic market position with the development of advanced applications for connected objects that shall attract customers with easy application deployment and attractive interaction possibilities, leading to the creation of WoT application marketplaces, where software vendors will monetize these apps. For the LIRIS lab, this project concretizes existing work from the Web service and semantic Web research fields. For the IRISA-CASA research team, it leads to context-aware solutions for dynamic code deployment on constrained devices and disruption-tolerant routing protocols. For the LCIS lab, it allows defining new agent interaction models for physical objects. The project is also an experimentation field to validate the work on energy-efficient cloud infrastructures.