Internet of Things

One of the first and most innovative RFID projects was I3 (FET EU) LIME, which had rfid tokens to bridge information in pubs, bus stations and community spaces.  Web 2.0 is very much become mundane for all generations, and citizens keep building informal layers (networks) between formal institutions and everyday practices. As of yet there are no people driven good honeypots (although attempts like Touchatag, Arduino, Arrayaent, Worldsensing, Pachube) to show the benefits of smart objects, smart homes, streets and cities in both the citizen focused and the industrial scenario, the key to negociating and facilitating the Internet of Things to and for citizens is to realize that they themselves are no stand alone subjects anymore but always in negociated relation to other individuals and other communities.

This entails that IOT is thought along the lines of ender user programming to such an extent that there is a balance in the agency of users to tweak and generic infrastructures that are designed to be as open as possible to allow for emerging services and applications.  The IOT should be designed for a generation that is not only hungry for content and services but also for extreme modification and personalization of the tools to use to sculpt their identiy. Privacy in this generation can be remodeld as ‘privacies’, different datsets that are tied to one identiy. Some data are essential in one identity set, not in others.

IoT can be broken down into 4 layers. A value chain where all objects can be tracked, logged and traced (much like the barcode standards). A service layer will be build on this, currently mostly by the mobile operators who will be offering filtering layer deals to customers just as they do now with sms/gsm. In a world where the batteries in your blinds are keen to text you when they run out, you better have some good filters. On top of this layer - and currently interwoven in it through the public private

partnerships- we find the smart city layer. The ultimate limit and scope of IoT the Sensing Planet idea where all natural processes are captured by enormous globally distributed sensor grids and have a counterpart in the cloud.  If there is no integrated vision on decentralized systems, alternatives to global naming schemes, open hardware and middleware then the future is that the four layers will operate seamlessly interoperable but mostly if not entirely closed. Free/Open Source means that there has to be an alternative to closed systems on all four layers