Web service is a common Internet application that enables interactions of machines over a network. As to establish ubiquitous Internet, enabling Web services on embedded systems is certainly among the development trend in near future. This paper presents an implementation of REST style or RESTful Web services on embedded system. The prototype had been implemented using a Xilinx Spartan-3E Starter FPGA board for home device control application on a 100Mbps LAN environment.

The cultural heritage of the italian territory is an impressive breadth of resources, unfortunately still little known today. Such a cultural heritage should be valued for the purpose is to better understand the Italian citizens their cultural identity, is to make known to the citizens of other nations the history of the place, with its story and its characters, and the life of the inhabitants, with their own traditions and customs. In this paper, it is introduced an adaptive Context-Aware app able to collect not-structured data, belonging to heterogeneous sources and develop tailored recommendations for the user, in order to support a tourist inside a town. The solution found takes advantage of information technologies, like Internet of Thing and Internet of Services and the objective is reached through the use of a system of description of the context through a graphical formalism named Context Dimension Tree. The system described was implemented in the city of Salerno in Italy and the results of a questionnaire distributed to the users show great appreciation.

Timetabling is an essential component of scheduling in all sectors of education. University timetabling entails the scheduling of times and venues for lectures and examinations. These activities are logically structured in a time-wise manner and presented on papers and placed on notice boards in order to avoid conflicts of event. However, timetable schedule forgetfulness, misinterpretation, miscopying, cost of rescheduling and slow time to reach for the rescheduled timetables are the challenges posed by the use of paper and notice board-based timetables; hence, the need for automated timetables. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of Android and web-based timetable customization systems for the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Bayero University, Kano-Nigeria. The web-based system provides an administrative module that facilitates scheduling and rescheduling of lecture, examination and invigilation timetables. In addition, the Android timetable customization system permits the user to view, customize, set reminders and provide rescheduled timetable updates.

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We present a novel Web-based Device Workflow Management Engine (WDWME) that supports seamless control and coordination of hardware devices. With this workflow engine, a series of activities or workflows regarding hardware functionality or services can be rapidly created via drag and drop. A working web-based workflow prototype has been developed as a proof of concept and tested using a device simulator to capture the task executions. In this work, a Feature Interaction Detection Engine (FIDE) is employed to validate the possible operation conflicts during the creation and pre-execution of a workflow. Additional JustifiedEvent-Condition-Action (JECA) rule and a Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) are proposed as future work to enhance the system's exception handling capability.

There has been an increase of focus in context modeling and reasoning research for ubiquitous network environment in recent years. In this paper, we present a novel approach to model and reason networked devices' context information through the support of a Context Modeling and Reasoning Engine (CMRE) architecture. As a proof of concept, a prototype system has been developed to demonstrate the functionalities of CMRE. To enhance the performance of CMRE, a Context Reasoner is embedded with a rule translator and a rule filter algorithm. With such a mechanism in place, various types of reasoning tasks can be performed with minimal conflicting contexts and rules in order to preserve the consistency of context knowledge database. Also, our CMRE prototype is further integrated with a Web-based Device Workflow Management (WDWM) engine, which enables end users to customize their workflow preferences in a user friendly manner.

This Communication reports on FPGA prototyping of an embedded web service that sends XML messages under two different packages, namely Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Representational State Transfer (REST). The request and response messages are communicated through a 100 Mbps local area network between a Spartan-3E FPGA board and washing machine simulator. The performances of REST-based and SOAP-based web services implemented on reconfigurable hardware are then compared. In general, the former performs better than the latter in terms of FPGA resource utilization (~12% less), message length (~57% shorter), and processing time (~4.5 μs faster). This work confirms the superiority of REST over SOAP for data transmission using reconfigurable computing, which paves the way for adoption of these low-cost systems for web services of consumer electronics such as home appliances.

The growth of XML usage raises the necessity for embedded XML parser implementation. Embedded systems differed from conventional computing platforms for its limited resources. Among existing XML parsers, SAX and VTD-XML appear to be potential candidates for embedded implementation. The former utilizes minimum resources to perform forward-only XML streaming; while the latter provides random access to XML document at moderate resources. This paper proposes a new idea of Roll-Back Streaming XML (RBStreX) parser for embedded XML parsing. RBStreX is a "pull" type SAX parser that can perform backward referencing through its "roll-back" mechanism. Its resource requirement is only slightly higher than that of SAX and much lower than that of VTD-XML. A simple RBStreX had been designed using VHDL and simulated using Altera Quartus II software.