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The great expansion of the Internet of Things in every aspect of daily life requires expertise and considerable skills in different fields and at different levels to create ad-hoc applications, and deliver suitable user experience. Developers have to deal with heterogeneous technologies, communication formats and protocols. They, in general, ask for new solutions that speed up the prototyping of applications, abstracting the extreme heterogeneity of sensors, actuators and smart objects, which they rely on. To demonstrate how to bridge this gap, here we propose an experience in rapid design and prototyping of an ambient assisted living system that detects the movements of elderly persons in their home, acquiring data through sensors in an unobtrusive way. Our solution is built on top of the WoX (Web of Topics) middleware, a model-driven cloud platform based on the concept of Topic – i.e. an entity containing the value of a feature of interest that we intend to detect – and on its local counterpart, the L-WoX (Local-Web of Topics) that manages local instances of features of interest, allowing mobile applications to collaborate among them, offering and receiving data.

The Web of Things paradigm has represented a shift in the conjunction of the Internet of Things (IoT) with people, as it allows treating a smart object as a Web resource. While in a first phase the challenge was the physically management of smart objects, the current demand is to help users in profitably introducing IoT in their own daily life.The paper presents a software architecture for IoT systems able to manage the behaviour of involved IoT entities basing on knowledge processing tools. The main goal is informing the user of the occurrence of events of interest semantically determined starting from actual state of the environment. The architecture exploits the potentialities of the Web of Topics (WoX) approach, a conceptual model that simplifies the designing of IoT applications. Leveraging the WoX approach, the architecture introduces an innovative way to mine knowledge from IoT devices aside from any technological background, so that facing the intrinsic heterogeneity affecting IoT entities. The discussed architecture is composed by different modules integrated into an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), strongly decoupled and provided with RESTful-compliant web interfaces to communicate each other and with the external environment, according to a SOA structure. The paper shows how the system is able to receive data coming from sensors and to semantically interpret them by means of a series of business rules that act as knowledge processor.

Developing Internet of Things (IoT) requires expertise and considerable skills in different fields in order to cover all the involved heterogeneous technologies, communication formats and protocols. Developers and experts ask for new solutions that speed up the prototyping of IoT applications. One of these solutions is Web of Topics (WoX) middleware, a model- driven Cloud platform that aims to ease IoT applications developing, introducing a strong semantic abstraction of the IoT concepts. In WoX, almost all the IoT entities and concepts are limited to the concept of Topic, i.e. an entity containing the value of a feature of interest that we intend to detect. The local counterpart of WoX is L-WoX (Local-Web of Topics), which manages local instances of features of interest, allowing mobile applications to collaborate among them, offering and receiving data to/from smart objects, and enabling the communication with WoX Cloud platform. The presented study leverages WoX approach for showing an experience in rapid design and prototyping of an ambient assisted living system that detects the movements of elderly persons in their home, acquiring data through sensors in an unobtrusive way. Moreover, the paper shows that the chosen model-driven solution is very suitable in a top-down approach, starting from users requirements: the created system simplifies the user-centered design of IoT applications, adopting a full top-down approach from user required to the technological solution.

Thanks to the proliferation of mobile technologies that enable devices to use the network for providing (publish) or requiring (subscribe) information according to specific applications aims, the Internet of Things (IoT) can be considered as the biggest challenge that the industry is currently facing. During the last years several application domains for IoT have emerged and among these the Smart Cities. In effect, the IoT is redrawing the Smart Cities in a promising way from the technological, economic, and social perspectives. This represents the background of the work described in the present paper that deals with an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) mobile system able to detect outdoor and indoor user positioning, acquiring data through sensors in an unobtrusive way. Our system exploits an IoT middleware, called WoX (Web of Topics) and its local counterpart L-WoX (Local-Web of Topics). Thanks to its model- driven approach, it is able to allow the communication between mobile applications and a set of heterogeneous sensors, orchestrating access services and communication protocols in a very abstract way.

Nodes of the Internet of Things (IoT) are heterogeneous: Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Near Field Communication (NFC), Wireless Sensors Networks (WSN), Konnex (KNX), just to name the most popular. IoT clients are heterogeneous too: mobile apps, laptops, enterprise applications, business processes instances, not to mention that even IoT nodes can be clients for other nodes. In this many-to-many relationship scenario, developing a seamless IoT system is arduous even for a specialized developer. All the more so, enable non-technical people to autonomously define innovative IoT-based scenarios is far from being trivial. This calls for the definition of a common design model shared by all the IoT stakeholder: device manufacturers, developers, stakeholders, business entities, end users. The Web of Things (WoT) paradigm has brought the IoT a step closer to the people perception, because it allows treating a networked thing as a Web resource. Nevertheless, sharing a common application layer protocol on top of the physical “things” does not guarantee that IoT application will be fast-developed, robust and easily evolvable. REST APIs definition for the IoT objects is left to the individual developer. Technological needs may vary along the application lifecycle. Stakeholders are often interested in virtual or aggregated environment features, rather than the single networked thing. To overcome these open issues, we think that it is needed an additional abstraction level between the WoT and the application layer. This should be model-driven – in order this to be adequately agreed by all the IoT stakeholders – and topic-based – because of the event-driven nature of the IoT. In this work we propose Web of Topics (WoX), a Cloud platform for the Internet of (every)Thing (IoE). WoX APIs allows companies and organisations to realise robust and high-maintainable IoT-based services, while minimising deployment costs and the time-to-market. Its model-driven approach guarantees a great end-user experience and a seamless integration among the heterogeneous IoT entities. In this book chapter we present the WoX model and the concrete architecture supporting it. As a proof of concept, in this work we also show how we implemented an original IoT scenarios using the WoX concepts, APIs and architecture: the airport short-stay parking service.

Mobile devices are able to gather more and more functionalities use- ful to control people's daily life facilities. They offer computational power and different kinds of sensors and communication interfaces, enabling users to mon- itor and interact with the environment by a single integrated tool. Near Field Communication (NFC) represents a suitable technology in the interaction be- tween digital world and real world. Most NFC-enabled mobile devices exploit the smart card features as a whole: e.g., they can be used as contactless payment and authentication systems. Nevertheless at present heterogeneity in mobile and IoT technologies does not permit to fully express potentialities of mobile devic- es as authentication systems, since most of the proposed solutions are strictly related to specific technological platforms. Basing on smart payment card ap- proach, Europay, MasterCard e VISA (EMV) protocols and Host Card Emula- tion (HCE) technology, the current work proposes a distributed architecture for using NFC-enabled mobile devices as possession factor in Multifactor Authen- tication (MFA) systems. The innovative idea of the proposal relies on its inde- pendence with respect to the specific software and hardware technologies. The architecture is able to distribute tokens to registered mobile devices for univo- cally identifying user identity, tracing its actions in the meanwhile. As proof of concept, a real case has been implemented: an Android/iOS mobile application to control a car central locking system by NFC.

In the Internet of Things, the extreme heterogeneity of sensors, actuators and user devices calls for new tools and design models able to translate the user’s needs in machine- understandable scenarios. The scientific community has proposed different solution for such issue, e.g., the MQTT (MQ Telemetry Transport) protocol introduced the topic concept as “the key that identifies the information channel to which payload data is published”. This study extends the topic approach by proposing the Web of Topics (WoX), a conceptual model for the IoT. A WoX Topic is identified by two coordinates: (i) a discrete semantic feature of interest (e.g. temperature, humidity), and (ii) a URI-based location. An IoT entity defines its role within a Topic by specifying its technological and collaborative dimensions. By this approach, it is easier to define an IoT entity as a set of couples Topic-Role. In order to prove the effectiveness of the WoX approach, we developed the WoX APIs on top of an EPCglobal implementation. Then, 10 developers were asked to build a WoX-based application supporting a physics lab scenario at school. They also filled out an ex-ante and an ex-post questionnaire. A set of qualitative and quantitative metrics allowed measuring the model’s outcome.

In last few years, the number of elderly people is more and more increasing. Consequently, various efforts were made in order to improve the quality of lifestyle for the elderly. Related to this issue, an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) works to create better living conditions for older or disable people. AAL systems are able to continuously monitor the health status of the elderly through data coming from heterogeneous sensors. In this paper, we propose an AAL architecture for the monitoring of elderly people, able to guarantee the collection of heterogeneous sensor data as well as the detection of critical events such as the older adult fall. A remote reasoning system processes this data with the aim of generating appropriate events. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture, a proof of concept was used and validation functional tests were carried out.

In the past few years, mobile phones have become an increasingly at- tractive platform for augmented reality. This paper describes the development of an interactive visualization system based on Augmented Reality Technolo- gies and the integration into a tourist mobile application for Android. The basic idea is to allow the time navigation of cultural points of interest by means of Augmented Reality. The real scene is enhanced by ancient images to increase the cultural experience of the tourist, who can realistically come back in the past.

Agile development methods are becoming increasingly important to face continuously changing requirements. Nevertheless, the adoption of such methods in industrial environments still needs to be fostered. Companies call for tools to keep under (quantitative) control both agility and coordination of IT teams. In this paper, we report on an empirical case study aiming at enabling real com-panies migrating from waterfall to Agile software development process. Our re-search effort has been spent in introducing 11 different IT small and medium-sized enterprises to Agile methods and to observe them executing real business projects. To have a common evaluation framework, we selected a set of 61 met-rics, with the purpose of monitoring and measuring the evolution towards Agile methods of each company involved in the experiment. In the paper, we provide readers with empirical data on companies’ feedback. We report on two different categories of real insights into what the companies are doing: (i) the metrics they consider to be useful and/or directly exploitable by product lines beyond the theoretical definitions; (ii) the tools and strategies they are adopting and connecting to existing development environments to easily collect data from the metrics, and evaluate quantitative improvements in the Agile methods.