Connecting your Mobile Shopping Cart to the Internet-of-Things

International audienceOnline shopping has reached an unforeseen success during the last decade thanks to the explosion of the Internet and the development of dedicated websites. Nonetheless, the wide diversity of e-commerce websites does not really foster the sales, but rather leaves the customer in the middle of dense jungle. In particular, finding the best offer for a specific product might require to spend hours browsing the Internet without being sure of finding the best deal in the end. While some websites are providing comparators to help the customer in finding the best offer meeting her/his requirements, the objectivity of these websites remains questionable, the comparison criteria are statically defined, while the nature of products they support is restricted to specific categories (e.g., electronic devices). In this paper, we introduce MACCHIATO as a user-centered platform leveraging online shopping. MACCHIATO implements the principles of the Internet-of-Things by adopting the REST architectural style and semantic web standards to navigate product databases exposed on the Internet. By doing so, customers keep the control of their shopping process by selecting the stores and comparing the offers according to their own preferences

HTTP Mailbox - Asynchronous RESTful Communication

We describe HTTP Mailbox, a mechanism to enable RESTful HTTP communication in an asynchronous mode with a full range of HTTP methods otherwise unavailable to standard clients and servers. HTTP Mailbox allows for broadcast and multicast semantics via HTTP. We evaluate a reference implementation using ApacheBench (a server stress testing tool) demonstrating high throughput (on 1,000 concurrent requests) and a systemic error rate of 0.01%. Finally, we demonstrate our HTTP Mailbox implementation in a human assisted web preservation application called "Preserve Me".Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, 8 code blocks, 3 equations, and 3 table

Beyond Web 2.0... And Beyond the Semantic Web

International audienceInitiated by Manuel Zacklad in 2003, the 'Socio-semantic Web' has recently seen important developments. Contrary to the Semantic Web, it is not interested in formal semantics but in semantics dependent on the human subject and on the semiotic substrate. Moreover, it aims at fostering people participation in knowledge work, such as Web 2.0 does for entertainment. In this trend, software design relies on three human and social phenomena: • documents, because they are proofs of something else, not in the manner of a mathematical proof but more in line of evidence that is kept and that can be mobilized; • interpretation, because the meaning of a document depends on its authors and readers; • intersubjectivity, because the confrontation between conflicting interpretations allows to overcome subjectivity. We illustrate our definition and design approach with descriptions of a course-material sharing platform and of a software enabling collaborative analysis

Adding semantic annotations into (Geospatial) RESTful services

In this paper the authors present an approach for the semantic annotation of RESTful services in the geospatial domain. Their approach automates some stages of the annotation process, by using a combination of resources and services: a cross-domain knowledge base like DBpedia, two domain ontologies like GeoNames and the WGS84 vocabulary, and suggestion and synonym services. The authors’ approach has been successfully evaluated with a set of geospatial RESTful services obtained from ProgrammableWeb.com, where geospatial services account for a third of the total amount of services available in this registry

EzWeb/FAST: Reporting on a Successful Mashup-based Solution for Developing and Deploying Composite Applications in the Upcoming "Ubiquitous SOA"

Service oriented architectures (SOAs) based on Web services have attracted a great interest and IT investments during the last years, principally in the context of business-to-business integration within corporate Intranets. However, they are nowadays evolving to break through enterprise boundaries, in a revolutionary attempt to make the approach pervasive, leading to what we call the ubiquitous SOA, i.e. a SOA conceived as a Web of services made up of compositional resources that empowers end-users to ubiquitously exploit these resources by collaboratively remixing them. In this paper we explore the architectural basis, technologies, frameworks and tools considered necessary to face this novel vision of SOA. We also present the rationale behind EzWeb/FAST: an undergoing EU funded project whose first outcomes could serve as a preliminary proof of concep

Mashups: An Approach to Overcoming the Business/IT Gap in Service-Oriented Architectures

For quite a long time already, great importance has been attached to the concept of Service-Oriented Architectures for future IT-architectures. However, a major challenge in implementing this concept lies in the gap between the functional department and IT department. Mashups, an architecture also based on services, try to avoid this gap by letting the user himself integrate the services. The following article analyzes similarities and differences between both architecture approaches, and explains to what extent and in which cases Mashups could complement a Service-Oriented Architecture