Uniting Online Social Networks with Places and ThingsMichael Blackstock Rodger Lea Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada mblackst, rleamagic.ubc.caAdrian Friday School of Computing and Communications InfoLab 21 Lancaster University Lancaster, UK adriancomp.lancs.ac.uk ABSTRACT As the Web of Things (WoT) broadens real world interaction via the internet, there is an increasing need for a user centric model for managing and interacting with real world objects. We believe that online social networks can provide that capability and can enhance existing and future WoT platforms leading to a Social WoT. As both social overlays and user interface containers, online social networks (OSNs) will play a significant role in the evolution of the web of things. As user interface containers and social overlays, they can be used by end users and applications as an on-line entry point for interacting with things, both receiving updates from sensors and controlling things. Conversely, access to user identity and profile information, content and social graphs can be useful in physical social settings like cafs. In this paper we describe some of the key features of social networks used by existing social WoT systems. We follow this with a discussion of open research questions related to integration of OSNs and how OSNs may evolve to be more suitable for integration with places and things. Several ongoing projects in our lab leverage OSNs to connect places and things to online communities. Keywords Social networks, internet of things, web of things 1. INTRODUCTION The Internet of Things, initially focused on identifying objects with RFID tags and wireless sensor networks, has evolved into a broader vision of integrating the digital and physical world akin in many ways to the vision for pervasive and ubiquitous computing. Like the pioneering work in wide area and pervasive systems such as CoolTown 14,19, ActiveCampus 7 and the GUIDE Project 6 and more recent work in ubiquitous systems 16 the IoT is beginning to embrace web standards 11,17, moving from incompatible islands of connected things to global connectivity over the web. This global network has been referred to as the “web of things” 10. Embracing the web architecture to give the physical world an online presence is not a new idea. The Cooltown project leveraged the simple and effective model of the web by providing a software layer called a “web presence” to integrate the physical environment with the web. In Cooltown, a web presence was software running on a server that provided a web user interface to a person, place or thing. Unlike other ubiquitous computing systems based on web services (WS-*) 3,7,13, and more recent IoT standards efforts such as DPWS 17 Cooltown not only embraced the HTTP protocol but the spirit of the web as a distributed system. Using Web protocols for naming objects (URLs), representing objects (HTML) and linking related people, places and things to each other using hyperlinks similar to how modern RESTful APIs and architectures expose application resources to application developers. Recent academic and commercial efforts under the label the “Web of Things” has aimed to create an open Web 2.0-style infrastructure to allow web developers to create innovative IoT products and services 2,10,22. Embracing the web affords the opportunistic use of connected things such as sensors, actuators and other digitally connected physical objects to create mashups where users can interact and collaborate with each other and the physical world 8,12. Users and mashups can be consumers of not only user-generated data but also machine-generated data. The emergence of online social network (OSN) web sites and systems such as Twitter, Open Social and Facebook are often considered another key component of Web 2.01. OSNs allow people to build and maintain connections with family, friends and coworkers. On these systems, users establish profiles to identify themselves, establish relationships with other users, and share content with others such as photos, videos, messages and status updates. Just as ubiquitous systems and the Web of Things have recently embraced web protocols and RESTful APIs to identify devices and establish physical world interaction for physical mashups, social networks have exposed their data models to applications to build social applications and link web sites to online communities 15. More recently commercial applications and systems are beginning to link social networks to the real world using mobile phones. Applications like Foursquare and Facebook places are using GPS- equipped phones to allow users to check-in to real world locations to find friends and earn rewards. Recent efforts leverage online social networks to share things on the web 9 using authentication mec