Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
have an ability to interact with other devices over the Internet, provide information
in interoperable form and consume/utilize such information. This overall concept
is known as Internet-of-Things (IoT).
Web Services was the buzz-word of last 10 years, as they enabled message-
based method invocation over the Internet, which mainly served for the purpose
of enabling the utilization of Web Based Software. As most research/studies was
focused on user-web or user-software interaction the heavyweight WS-* technolo-
gies (using standards, such as SOAP, WSDL, UDDI) worked smoothly. In fact as
mentioned in Guinard et al. (
2011a
) these technologies are too heavy and complex
for interacting with the connected devices (i.e. Things). In fact RESTful architec-
tural style (which will be elaborated on in the following section) provide signifi-
cant advantages in (i) facilitating the interaction with Things, (ii) consuming the
information provided by these Things.
In recent years there is a huge trend for development of tiny embedded Web
Servers (even on cards and microchips) which are capable of providing informa-
tion regarding the its container device. The information is generally provided in
structured XML document or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) formats by these
tiny Web Servers. These formats are easy to read and interpret for both humans and
computers/devices. As mentioned in Guinard et al. (
2011a
) this makes it possible to
interact with devices via Web Browsers and thus explore the world of smart Things
with its many relationships (via links to other related Things). Dynamically gen-
erated real-world data on smart objects can be displayed on such “representative”
Web pages, and then processed with Web 2.0 tools. This is generally referred as
web-enablement of devices, and offers various opportunities from novice to expert
developers who can build applications on these devices. In addition, as Web 2.0
enables and supports Mashups (i.e. unified representation of small pieces of infor-
mation that is acquired from different resources) many web-enabled devices can
provide real-time information for these Mashups. Paraimpu (
2012
) is an example of
Mashup environments where a device can broadcast information directly to the web.
Various urban management tasks ranging from emergency response, indoor
navigation to traffic flow monitoring benefits from the use of real-time informa-
tion that is provided with devices that are connected to the Internet. In fact as the
nature of the urban management domain is concerned with the real-world phe-
nomena the key aspect of the information is being geo-referenced. In addition, in
urban management domain most events occur in spaces which can be represented
with discrete geometries. The discrete (and predefined) geometries can be used to
represent a space that an event occurs, a space that is observed, or a space that
exists in a certain period of time. The spaces can represent an arbitrary volume
outdoors, a bounding box (a container space of a building) or a volume indoors
that is represented by boundaries (i.e. walls, floors etc.). In this situation, a device
can provide information regarding the discrete space that the device is located in,
or can provide information regarding its own state. In the first option (which is the
most commonly observed situation) the device should provide information on its
container space, on the other hand the space should be aware of the devices that is
contained in them.
