Towards a Situation-Aware Architecture for the Wisdom Web of Things

Computers are getting smaller, cheaper, faster, with lower power requirements, more memory capacity, better connectivity, and are increasingly distributed. Accordingly, smartphones became more of a commodity worldwide, and the use of smartphones as a platform for ubiquitous computing is promising. Nevertheless, we still lack much of the architecture and service infrastructure we will need to transition computers to become situation aware to a similar extent that humans are. Our Everything is Alive (EiA) project illustrates an integrated approach to fill in the void with a broad scope of works encompassing Ubiquitous Intelligence (RFID, spatial searchbot, etc.), Cyber-Individual (virtual world, 3D modeling, etc.), Brain Informatics (psychological experiments, computational neuroscience, etc.), and Web Intelligence (ontology, workflow, etc.). In this paper, we describe the vision and architecture for a future where smart real-world objects dynamically discover and interact with other real or virtual objects, humans or virtual human. We also discuss how the vision in EiA fits into a seamless data cycle like the one proposed in the Wisdom Web of Things (W2T), where data circulate through things, data, information, knowledge, wisdom, services, and humans. Various open research issues related to internal computer representations needed to model real or virtual worlds are identified, and challenges of using those representations to generate visualizations in a virtual world and of “parsing” the real world to recognize and record these data structures are also discussed. 4.1 Everything is Alive We know that computers are getting smaller, cheaper, faster, with lower power requirements, more memory capacity, better connectivity, and are increasingly distributed. Mainframes were bulky centralized computers; desktops distributed computing to the masses; and laptops began the portability revolution that resulted in today’s smartphones which you can both talk into and compute with they know