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Autonomous search in a social and ubiquitous Web

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Abstract

Recent W3C recommendations for the Web of Things (WoT) and the Social Web are turning hypermedia into a homogeneous information fabric that interconnects heterogeneous resources: devices, people, information resources, abstract concepts, etc. The integration of multi-agent systems with such hypermedia environments now provides a means to distribute autonomous behavior in worldwide pervasive systems. A central problem then is to enable autonomous agents to discover heterogeneous resources in worldwide and dynamic hypermedia environments. This is a problem in particular in WoT environments that rely on open standards and evolve rapidly—thus requiring agents to adapt their behavior at run time in pursuit of their design objectives. To this end, we developed a hypermedia search engine for the WoT that allows autonomous agents to perform approximate search queries in order to retrieve relevant resources in their environment in (weak) real time. The search engine crawls dynamic WoT environments to discover and index device metadata described with the W3C WoT Thing Description, and exposes a SPARQL endpoint that agents can use for approximate search. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we implemented a prototype application for the maintenance of industrial robots in worldwide manufacturing systems. The prototype demonstrates that our semantic hypermedia search engine enhances the flexibility and agility of autonomous agents in a social and ubiquitous Web.

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Notes

  1. http://nodered.org/, accessed: April 15, 2020.

  2. http://www.ifttt.com/, accessed: April 15, 2020.

  3. https://github.com/thingWeb/thingWeb-directory/, accessed: April 15, 2020.

  4. https://project.inria.fr/corese/

  5. https://github.com/thingWeb/thingWeb-directory/, accessed: April 15, 2020.

  6. This design choice draws from a line of research on engineering agent environments [51].

  7. See [7] for a more detailed discussion.

  8. Such as the activity of the W3C Social Web Working Group (https://www.w3.org/Social/WG) and Interest Group (https://www.w3.org/Social/IG).

  9. https://w3id.org/stn

  10. The color code values used in our demonstrator correspond to nuances of green and red used by Philips Hue.

  11. https://github.com/Interactions-HSG/yggdrasil/tree/iot2019/

  12. See https://project.inria.fr/corese/ and also http://corese.inria.fr/

  13. https://vertx.io/, accessed: April 15, 2020.

  14. https://github.com/Interactions-HSG/wot-search/

  15. https://github.com/Wimmics/corese

  16. https://youtu.be/iuTzzMA-7FI

  17. https://github.com/Interactions-HSG/wot-search-manufacturing/

  18. https://github.com/Interactions-HSG/leubot

  19. https://github.com/thingWeb/thingWeb-directory/, accessed: September 08, 2019.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Andrei Ciortea & Simon Mayer

  2. Inria, Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, I3S, Sophia Antipolis, France

    Andrei Ciortea, Fabien Gandon & Olivier Corby

  3. ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Simon Mayer & Simon Bienz

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  1. Andrei Ciortea
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This article is an extended version of our publication at the 9th International Conference on the Internet of Things (IoT 2019) [2] and positions our search engine for the Web of Things in the broader context of a social and ubiquitous Web, which is presented in Section 3.

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Ciortea, A., Mayer, S., Bienz, S. et al. Autonomous search in a social and ubiquitous Web. Pers Ubiquit Comput 28, 259–272 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-020-01415-1

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