We increasingly own more and more personal devices
We want applications that work across these devices, as well
as those of our friends
The webinos project is
developing distributed Web technologies to make this
into a seamless, stress free experience
Scenario sharing a video with a friend
Sue is visiting her friend Bill's house, and is keen to share
with him a movie, which another of her friends, Janet has just
sent her a message with an enthusiastic recommendation and a
pointer to a review. Sue is looking at Janet's message on her
smart phone, and now wants to start playing the movie on Bob's
surround sound big screen entertainment system in his den. Sue
clicks on the share button in the web application and selects
"find local devices" from the pop-up menu. She see's Bob's home
entertainment system and selects it. A confirmation message
appears on Bob's big screen, and he clicks ok on his remote
controller. The movie starts and Sue sits down and moves closer to
Bob, the lights fade as the music starts, ...
How does this work?
Technical Background
"Find local devices" invokes discovery protocols (demo coming up)
Many kinds of interconnect technologies: Mobile networks, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB, ...
How can Bob authenticate Sue's request to access his TV?
Answer: exploit fact that Sue is in Bob's social graph
To see how this works we need to look at "Personal Zones"
Local Discovery!
The following services were found with multicast DNS:
The following services were found with SSDP (UPnP):
The following services were found with SLP:
The following services were found with Bluetooth:
The following services were found with USB:
(this demo assumes you have installed the discovery plugin for Linux)
Personal Zones
Administrative zone encompassing your personal devices and cloud-based services
Exposed to web apps as a set of local Zone APIs
Single sign on, and synchronization across the zone
Synchronization — distributed 3-way merge of tree data inspired by
distributed revison control systems
Support for peer to peer communication across NAT/Firewalls
Overlay network model that hides details of device
interconnect technologies via 3rd party libraries
Optimizing battery life and network resources
Personal Zone visible on Internet as a URL
Acts as a social agent on your behalf, exposing your social
graph and personalized services, subject to authorization
Provided as a value-added federated service by your ISP or other
3rd party or even your home gateway server using standard open
source components
As a friend of Bob, Sue can access information about
Bob's devices (at least the one's he chooses to allow this for).
This enables Sue's devices to communicate with Bob's even in the
absence of a shared local network connection. This also opens the
way for context based discovery, e.g. finding devices near me,
based upon my current location, and social proximity, as
determined from metadata exposed to Sue, by Bob's social agent.
Returning to the current example, the app on Sue's phone can make
use of the social graph in her personal zone to authenticate the
request to the app running on Bob's TV.
Distributed search based upon social relevance
Lookup by email address or phone number
Sue gets an email from an old friend Anabela and
decides to add Anabela to her social graph. Sue find's Anabela's
Personal Zone based upon Anabela's email address, using either Web
Finger, or DNS-SD. This takes the domain name for the email
address and performs a lookup, either by mapping it to a URL with
a well known path, or by retrieving the DNS TEXT record and
looking for an entry giving the URL for the search service
operated by Anabela's email provider. This maps the email address
to the URL for Anabela's Personal Zone.
Lookup by name or pseudonym
At the same time Sue thinks of another old friend
Henrietta. Sue doesn't know Henrietta's email address, and instead
makes use of the distributed social search service, provided
collectively by the Web of personal zones. This could be based on
Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs). The challenge is to allow for
search based upon matching context, and to preserve privacy whilst
doing so. For example, there could be many Henriettas, but the one
that went to the same school in the same year is much more likely
to be relevant. The search service should be able to perform
ranking based upon social cues, without allowing users to invade
other people's privacy.
Webinos is a European funded
project aiming to deliver a platform for Web applications across
devices such as mobile, desktop, home media (TV) and in-car units.
The webinos platform will be delivered as open source
Over 20 partners with a total cost of 14 million euros
AmbieSense Ltd (UK), BMW Forschung und Technik GmbH (DE),
Deutsche Telekom (DE), DOCOMO (GMBH), Fraunhofer Gesellschaft zur
Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. (DE), futuretext (UK),
IBBT (B), Impleo (UK), Istituto Superiore Mario Boella (I),
National Technical University of Athens (GR), Nederlandse
Organisatie voor toegepast Natuurwetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NL),
Politecnico di Torino (I), Samsung Electronics (UK) Ltd, Sony
Ericsson Mobile Communication AB (S), Technische Universität
München (DE), Telecom Italia S.p.A. (I), Telefonica (ES),
Università di Catania (I), University of Oxford (UK), http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/ssai/projects-call5_en.html
VisionMobile Ltd. (UK), Volantis Systems Ltd (UK), W3C (F)
We increasingly own lots of devices and want to use
apps that run on these and those of our friends. Personal zones
provide a means to manage our devices and cloud based services.
This includes a social agent that acts on our behalf to enable
apps to be aware of social proximity, and the agents collectively,
support distributed search ranked by social relevance. The EU
Webinos research project is working on realizing this architecture
as an open source platform.
My thanks to my colleague Rigo Wenning for help
with this paper and to the EU
PrimeLife project for work in privacy and identity management.
