SENSE-SATION: An extensible platform for integration of phones into the web

Abstract

The "Web of Things" vision promotes the integration of smart devices into web, using web technologies and protocols as underlying interaction mechanisms with smart devices. Technically many phones include various sensors and provide a large-scale sensing platform. To make this functionality available to a large number of (web) developers our research aims at easing the creation of applications that use mobile context data (e.g., movement data). We present a sensing platform for mobile devices, called SENSE-SATION, which gathers and stores available information on a mobile phone and makes this information directly accessible via RESTful web services - locally and remotely. By using a concept of virtual sensors, the platform supports the full development process, from the initial idea via adapting/extending the platform to incremental development of virtual sensors and applications via Web 2.0 controls. Hence, (web) developers can create arbitrary context-aware applications that make use of mobile hardware capabilities without touching mobile phone programming at all. In this paper we discuss the design issues and provide case studies to describe how this platform can empower the development of social, context-aware applications. ©2010 IEEE.