Making Bits and Atoms Talk Today: A Practical Architecture for Smart Object Interaction

Abstract

Bringing together the physical and digital worlds has been the subject of research for some time now. In particular, a number of successful prototypes that link physical objects with digital information (often called smart object systems) have already been presented. However, a generally accepted architecture to design such systems has not yet emerged. This paper presents a reusable and practical framework for developing smart object applications today. At the basis of our approach lies the use of Semantic Web technology to drive interaction between the physical and digital worlds. We used this framework to develop SemaNews, a novel application that combines the advantages of digital news feeds with those of physical newspapers. We prove that our architecture is reusable by building a second prototype in a different application domain: STalkingObjects implements the basic components of a store of the future.