A journey from the Physical Web to the Physical Semantic Web

Abstract

ThePhysical Semantic Web (PSW) is a novel paradigm built upon the Google Physical Web (PW) approach and devoted to improve the quality of interactions in the Web of Things. Beacons expose semantic annotations instead of basic identifiers, le\ machine-understandable descriptions of physical resources. This enables novel ontology-based object advertisement and discovery and - in turn - advanced user-to-thing and autonomous thing-to-thing interactions. The demo shows the evolution from the PW to the PSW in a discovery scenario set in a winery, where bottles are equipped with Bluetooth Low Energy beacons and a customer can discover them using her smartphone. The final goal is to prove benefits of PSW over basic PW, including: rich semantic-based object annotation; dynamic annotations exploiting on-board sensors; enhanced discovery and ranking of nearby objects through semantic matchmaking; availability of interactions even without working Internet infrastructure, by means of point-to-point data exchanges.