Web Squared: When Web 2.0 Meets Internet of Things
Recently Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle released a white paper entitled Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On. It focuses squarely, pardon the pun, on the intersection of social web technologies with the emerging Internet of Things (real world objects connected to the Internet).
The 'web squared' moniker is, commercially speaking, a none to subtle attempt to re-brand web 2.0. This had to be done so that the conference series of that name, which O'Reilly and Battelle jointly run along with the company TechWeb, remains relevant. But less cynically, the report also nicely applies Web 2.0 principles onto the emerging Internet of Things.
The term 'web squared' is defined in the report as "web meets world." The squared bit also references that "the Web opportunity is no longer growing arithmetically; it's growing exponentially."
Collective Intelligence 2.0
The report starts by noting what O'Reilly and Battelle believe was the core proposition of 'web 2.0' back in 2004: "Web 2.0 is all about harnessing collective intelligence." The pair go on to say that web 2.0 is currently being applied to areas they hadn't predicted in '04, such as mobile and internet-connected objects.
Specifically, sensors are providing a new source of data for web 2.0 techniques. As the report puts it, "collective intelligence applications are no longer being driven solely by humans typing on keyboards but, increasingly, by sensors."
Where the report differs from the traditional view of Internet of Things is that it doesn't view sensor data as just mechanical data from RFID tags and other non-human sources. The authors argue that humans are producing sensor data of their own, in particular using their mobile phones. They note that today's smartphones "contain microphones, cameras, motion sensors, proximity sensors, and location sensors (GPS, cell-tower triangulation, and even in some cases, a compass)."
No matter what the source of sensor data, after it's gathered collective intelligence can be applied to it. The authors term this a "virtuous feedback loop," whereby sensor-based applications get better the more people use them.
Information Shadows
Another key point is that, much like in Web 2.0 apps, there is an entire ecosystem that uses and builds off the data. Real world objects have "information shadows" on the Web (this is a term originally coined by Mike Kuniavsky of ThingM).
The example in the report is a book, which has information shadows "on Amazon, on Google Book Search, on Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing, on eBay and on BookMooch, on Twitter, and in a thousand blogs."
Do We Need RFID? It'd Be Nice...
One contentious point in the report is when it questioned whether RFID is actually required to make an Internet of Things. The authors argue that it isn't:
"A bottle of wine on your supermarket shelf (or any other object) needn't have an RFID tag to join the Internet of Things, it simply needs you to take a picture of its label. Your mobile phone, image recognition, search, and the sentient web will do the rest. We don't have to wait until each item in the supermarket has a unique machine-readable ID. Instead, we can make do with bar codes, tags on photos, and other "hacks" that are simply ways of brute-forcing identity out of reality."
This line of thought seems to parallel the argument usually put forth by web 2.0 proponents against the top-down Semantic Web: that it isn't practical to expect publishers to enter metadata into their content, instead let it bubble up with a mix of collective intelligence and machine processing.
To hammer home this point, the report claims that "evidence shows that formal systems for adding a priori meaning to digital data are actually less powerful than informal systems that extract that meaning by feature recognition." They use the example of a book: "an ISBN provides a unique identifier for a book, but a title + author gets you close enough."
Good enough has always been a design principle on the Web, so this makes sense. However, much like the battles back in '04-'05 to define web 2.0 (or dispute the existence of it) ultimately it's a moot point. RFID tags will become more common place, it's just a matter of time.
Let's face it, a 'smart' RFID chip on a bottle of wine - one that knows its production and travel history, its temperature, its price relative to similar bottles of wine, etc - will beat human hacking anytime. But, as the report rightly notes, don't expect that level of automation via RFID any time soon. Our recent post examining the current state of RFID clearly showed that it's years away.
Conclusion
To say that sensor data can be both machine generated (e.g. by RFID chips) and human generated is perhaps trying too hard to force the web 2.0 world into the new emerging Internet of Things. But that's neither here nor there. Where the 'web squared' report is spot on, is its point that applying collective intelligence to sensor data will be a rich vein of opportunity in the coming years.
Clearly the web 2.0 philosophy can and will merge with Internet of Things. The report by O'Reilly and Battelle is a great primer for that.
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Web 2.0 is getting increasingly popular in application now. With this sensor and tracking application, wonder what personal privacy advocators have to say about it.
"...web 2.0 proponents against the top-down Semantic Web..."
Hey, that's me!
P.S. RDF sucks
There's something that already does what you say on your example:
http://www.AVIN.CC
from @andrerib 's http://www.adegga.com
Very interesting article... I am one of the guys that started Corkboard (www.corkboard.it) which aims to do exactly this: bridge the virtual and the real world in the context of a remember-recommend-discover network.
We started it as a memory-only service (sort of like evernote) but and quickly figured out that we needed the network to allow for sharing and discovery (yes, we have pages on our wiki about how to use collective intelligence to train the bridge.)
Now we're realizing that Corkboard.it or any other kind of company with limited resources like us should really focus on deepening this brain (both by pulling from open APIs and having the users of the service help teach this brain) and plug it into where the activity is already taking place (ie Twitter) — So you end up with Twitter being the senses if you will that connect into this brain which turns tweets into real-world things that can be saved/shared and recommended.
I interpreted the web squared paper to also refer to the exponential speeding up of the web - the real time aspect as well as the internet of things.
In a way web squared is about REAL - real time and real world.
Dear Sir,
Nice article. BTW - where did you find the image of the iphone app scanning the wine bottle?
Thx,
James
This is really a nice post!
This gives ideas and information which helps as a reference.
I might apply this.
thanks for posting!
http://hostwisely.com
We are in exponential times for sure. But Web Squared is really Web Cubed when you add the following to the mix:
1. Web Referencable Real World Objects (RWO)
2. Implicit association of Web Referencable RWOs with their Web Addressable Metadata
3. Metadata that is Entity-Attribute-Value data model based
4. Each Entity, Attribute, or Value (optionally) is endowed with an HTTP based URI for Identity/Naming
5. People interact with systems that unobtrusively straddle RWO instances and RWO data dictionaries.
The items above are a distillation of the quote in this post that states:
"Real world objects have "information shadows" on the Web (this is a term originally coined by Mike Kuniavsky of ThingM)." .
Note: We have RWOs, their Information Shadows (Metadata), and the Data Dictionaries (Schemas, Vocabs, Ontologies) that define them. When you tie all three together you end up with a 3-Dimensional as opposed to 2-Dimensional basis for our exponential times.
Links:
1. http://tr.im/vK2P -- State of the Linked Data Web (which shows the People, Instance Data, and Dictionary Data intersections)
2. http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen/?id=1442 - Serendipitious Discovery Quotient .
Kingsley
Interesting discussion points, Richard. Good that Kingsley provided a bit of Linked Data education in the comment above.
The authors' point on overengineered RFID is well taken, but you're right--there's no substitute for the RF part of RFID. Different protocol stacks are necessary for railcars than for dragonfly-sized drones, staring at the bottom with different transmission methods. That takes time to develop.
Nice new "barcode" technology from the MIT that might be another alternative for the RFID (too much RF already around us !) : the Bokode : http://web.media.mit.edu/~ankit/bokode/
I am stil amazed at how precise image recognition and tracking has become, best recent examples are the augmented reality apps for mobile phone as well as the SnapTell iPhone app : it even looked up an eBay posting for an old vinyle record it recognized from the cover !!
Drawing a relationship between RFID and the "top-down" design of the semantic web is so off-base as to be perverse. I mention it only because it confuses people about the issue.
The report is right to question whether everything needs an RFID tag. Everything needn't always be tracked, does it?
An RFID is a well-organized objective identification system for tracking objects through chains of possession or movement. It has no other purpose.
An RFID is tag like a semantic tag. But that is as far as it goes.
a. an RFID is an substitute (digital) identity for a specific object. Example: an RFID tag = a specific item.
b. a semantic tag is the assertion of a relation or an ascription of meaning. Exampe: Joe's pizza is the best pizza in Brooklyn.
Ir is not the same sort of thing --like comparing apples and oranges.
You wrote: "Good enough has always been a design principle on the Web"
I don't mean to be the constant critic, but I don't think that applies to the depth of insight in this article.
The "information shadows" phrase seems to have a similar feel to what William Gibson (Neuromancer, etc.) frequently mentioned in a number of stories as "information/data traces". However, the traces applied to people and the aggregation of these traces revealed a rich level of detail about the subject.
James,
the picture stems from touchatag. (http://www.touchatag.com)
touchatag provides and RFID/2D barcode service for consumers, applications developers and enterprises/operators (then mostly focused on what we call contactless wallet 2.0: contactless mobile payment..)
regards
Toon