Escaping the Streetlight Effect

Abstract

The integration of systems of autonomous agents in Web of Things (WoT) environments is a promising approach to provide and distribute intelligence in world-wide pervasive systems. A central problem then is to enable autonomous agents to discover heterogeneous resources in large-scale, dynamic WoT environments. This is true in particular if an environment relies on open-standards and evolves rapidly requiring agents to adapt their behavior to achieve their goals. To this end, we developed a search engine for the WoT that allows autonomous agents to perform approximate search queries in order to find relevant resources in their environment in (weak) real time. The search engine crawls dynamic WoT environments to discover and index device metadata described with the W3C WoT Thing Description, and exposes a SPARQL endpoint that agents can use for approximate search. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we implemented a prototype application for the maintenance of industrial robots in world-wide manufacturing systems. The prototype demonstrates that our semantic hypermedia search engine enhances the flexibility and agility of autonomous agents in the WoT.

Trustable service discovery for highly dynamic decentralized workflows

“…Where such information is supplied by a service provider, this can be rendered as RDF triples to provide the SPARQL microservice's description. Bienz et al [22] have demonstrated the use of SPARQL endpoints to provide approximate search capabilities for physical devices, seeded from published WoT TDs.…”

Proactive Digital Companions in Pervasive Hypermedia Environments

“…The hypermedia environments are pervasive in two fundamental ways: (i) they provide DCs with uniform access to devices in their physical environment, and (ii) they pervade all application areas-since the Web provides a flexible underpinning that can interconnect all these pervasive hypermedia environments in one worldwide system. DC can then navigate the Web (individually or using hypermedia search engines [3]) to discover and interact with digital services, devices, people, other agents, or any other resources on the Web. In addition to uniform access, pervasive hypermedia environments can also be designed and programmed to support interaction, coordination, and stigmergy among people and DCs (see also [4]), or they can act as shared knowledge repositories-e.g., a place where both people and DCs can create and share Web annotations [5].…”

“…See also the Dagstuhl Seminar on Autonomous Agents on the Web (to be held on February 14-19, 2021): https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/ semhp/?semnr=21072 3. At the First International Conference on the World Wide Web (1994), Sir Tim Berners-Lee was noting that documents on the Web describe real objects and relationships among them, and if the semantics of these objects are represented explicitly then machines can browse through and manipulate reality: https://videos.cern.ch/record/2671957…”