PROFICIENT: Productivity Tool for Semantic Interoperability in an Open IoT Ecosystem

The Internet of Things (IoT) is promising to open up opportunities for businesses to offer new services to uncover untapped needs. However, before taking advantage of such opportunities, there are still challenges ahead, one of which is the development of strategies to abstract from the heterogeneity of APIs that shape today's IoT. It is becoming increasingly complex for developers and smart connected objects to efficiently discover, parse, aggregate and process data from disparate information systems, as different protocols, data models, and serializations for APIs exist on the market. Standards play an indisputable role in reducing such a complexity, but will not solve all problems related to interoperability. For example, it will remain a permanent need to help and guide data/service providers to efficiently describe the data/services they would like to expose to the IoT. This paper presents PROFICIENT, a productivity tool that fulfills this need, which is showcased and evaluated considering recent open messaging standards and a smart parking scenario

Searching in a web-based infrastructure for smart things

Abstract—Given the expected high number of accessible digi-tally augmented devices and their communication requirements, this paper presents our work on creating a Web-based infrastruc-ture for smart things to facilitate the integration, look-up, and interaction with such devices for human users and machines. To exploit the locality of interactions with and between smart things, the proposed infrastructure treats the location of a smart thing as its main property and is therefore structured hierarchically according to logical place identifiers. We discuss the infrastruc-ture’s look-up mechanism that leverages Web patterns to foster scalability and load balancing and features an advanced caching mechanism that greatly reduces the response time and number of exchanged messages. These properties are demonstrated in an evaluation in a simulated smart environment. I

Supporting Device Discovery and Spontaneous Interaction with Spatial References

The RELATE interaction model is designed to support spontaneous interaction of mobile users with devices and services in their environment. The model is based on spatial references that capture the spatial relationship of a user’s device with other co-located devices. Spatial references are obtained by relative position sensing and integrated in the mobile user interface to spatially visualize the arrangement of discovered devices, and to provide direct access for interaction across devices. In this paper we discuss two prototype systems demonstrating the utility of the model in collaborative and mobile settings, and present a study on usability of spatial list and map representations for device selection

Dynamic Control of a Robotic Swarm using a Service-Oriented Architecture

The development, deployment, and control of groups of robots is a tedious process even for experienced roboticists. Particularly in heterogeneous systems a high granularity of control and visibility is difficult to achieve. The lack of standardized interfaces and communication protocols to interconnect robots from different manufacturers makes it very difficult to develop flexible robotic applications. We propose an efficient system suited to support heterogeneous robotic swarms that can be used as a toolkit for fast prototyping of robust distributed applications. This system offers a flexible interface allowing external users to remotely control the swarm over the internet by using standardized communication protocols such as Web Services

Vers une nouvelle érudition : numérisation et recherche en histoire du livre

En décembre 1999, à l\u27Enssib, s’est déroulé le colloque "Vers une nouvelle érudition : numérisation et recherche en histoire du livre", organisé dans le cadre des 12e Entretiens du Centre Jacques Cartier sous la responsabilité de Dominique Varry (enssib), Annie Charon (école nationale des chartes) et Guylaine Baudry (Université de Montréal)

RelateGateways: A User Interface for Spontaneous Interaction with Pervasive Services

RelateGateways is a user interface and system that supports end-user discovery of and interaction with services dynamically encountered in their immediate environment. The interface is designed for mobile devices and indicates available services through small widgets arranged at the periphery of the screen based on a compass metaphor

Extending Mobile Devices with Spatially Arranged Gateways to Pervasive Services

Discovery and interaction with services is as much a user interface problem as a networking problem. In this paper we introduce a system in which mobile devices are seamlessly extended with Gateways to services in their environment. The gateways are realized as widgets that are arranged around the edge of the mobile device’s user interface to indicate the direction of discovered services, thus providing the user with an overview of interaction opportunities. The gateways also afford direct access to services integrate with the device’s interface, for example supporting drag-and-drop of objects to a gateway and through the gateway to the corresponding service

RelateGateways: Using Spatial Context to Identify and Interact with Pervasive Services

Our everyday life is surrounded by pervasive services such as those offered by printers, public displays, multimedia systems, workstations, etc. While on the run we should be able to use the mobile devices we carry along to interact with these services. Yet, a number of studies have shown that it is rather complicated for users to identify available services in an unknown context. The RelateGateways project extends the mobile desktop with a new kind of widget: the gateways. These components are arranged around the edge of the screen, pointing towards the co-located services. Once identified, a service can be consumed in a consistent manner by dragging-and-dropping an object on the gateway, without the need for the user to install, configure or learn how to use yet another system for each service