Street Web
A Framework for “Web on the Road” Smart Services
Michele Angelaccio and Berta Buttarazzi
Department of Enterprise Engineering, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Rome, Italy
Keywords: Internet of Cultural Things, Internet of Things, Mobile First, Modelling, Mobile Web, Beacon, NFC, QRcode,
Smart Sensor.
Abstract: Many recent trends in mobile web and context aware applications are leading to consider new applicative
scenario including the so called smart services which are characterized by the use of autonomous devices
connected to internet (sensors, beacons, etc.) cooperating with user personal mobile devices (tablet,
smartphone, etc.). In this work we describe a conceptual framework, called STREET (Sensor network "on
The Road " for EnhancEd internet of Touristic things) WEB, aimed to support mobile users moving in smart
scenarios (e.g smart tourism) with the aim to combine context aware information and high quality geo
marketing services in the same web infrastructure enhanced with sensors. STREET WEB makes possible to
implement smart services (smart museum, etc.) in an easy way by integrating micro servers, distributed in the
scenario (servers on the road), called smart boxes, working as a geo based Cloud system in an autonomous
way, as a Distributed Local Storage system, without remote internet access.
1 INTRODUCTION
With the continuous development of ICT technology
we are seeing the widespread introduction of a new
model of the Internet, called "Internet of Things“
(IoT) (Atzori et al., 2010; Ashton, 2009).
According to this model, the things or smart
objects include sensors which are interconnected and
are able to exchange information on their condition or
on the surrounding environment (Razzaque et al.,
2016).
Day by day, smart objects become more numerous
and will grow exponentially as they will be able to
connect to the network not only computers and
smartphones, but also cars, historical buildings, foods
and more other cultural things (Gartner, 2013).
This will generate a big mole of information.
With the development technology and the spread of
IoT paradigm (Kortuem et al., 2010) it was necessary
for the tourist a web service usable directly in the
territory (Angelaccio et al., 2012; Kenteris, 2009).
According to this new paradigm arises Street
Web, a web service, based on Smart Tourist Box
(STB), to distribute tourist information "on the road".
STB is a special IoT device designed and
implemented to realize a Wireless Sensor Network
(WSN) devoted to:
store touristic data in a local database (MySQL
or NoSQL);
enable “mobile-first” web based application
(optimized for mobile devices), to access
stored data.
STB, properly located on the road, realize Street Web.
The paper is organised as follows: Section II
introduces Street Web, the platform to distribute
tourist information "on the road" based on Smart
Tourist Box (STB). Section III introduces the Mobile
First Architecture and presents the proposed approach
and the main features of Mobile First Architecture.
Section IV shows some scenarios of Mobile First
application. Section V concludes the paper and
discusses the future work.
2 STREET WEB OVERVIEW
Street Web is the platform to distribute tourist
information "on the road" based on Smart Box (SB).
The name STREET derives from “Sensor network
on The Road for EnhancEd Internet of Touristic
things”. The platform is based on a network of micro
servers (SB) placed in a touristic area with
monuments (historical centers, museums,
archaeological sites, etc.) devoted to:
Angelaccio, M. and Buttarazzi, B.
Street Web - A Framework for “Web on the Road” Smart Services.
In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2016) - Volume 1, pages 299-302
ISBN: 978-989-758-186-1
Copyright
c
2016 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
299
store touristic data in a database (MySQL or
NoSQL;
enable “mobile-first” web based application
(optimized for mobile devices), to access
stored data.
The aim is to provide a true local internet without
the need to connect remote servers and with the
capability to furnish the access to cultural contents to
all visitors walking in the place.
The reason is twofold: former the system will be
designed for high quality slow tourism (Pilgrim first)
and hence with the purpose to avoid the need to have
remote connections, the latter is related to the fact that
cultural things and tourism booking are becoming a
critical resource to escape from the control of OTT
(Over-The-Top).
The working scenario depicted in Figure n.1
shows the pathway executed by a generic mobile
visitor, equipped with a Mobile-First application
front end. Through a localization/alerting system
(based on BLE Beacon) the user, while walking, is
notified of all application steps. These steps are
organized in accord to three types of interaction:
event-alerting, local content interaction, dynamic
map navigation.
The physical architecture is composed of a
network of different nodes called Smart Box (SB),
each representing a complete working station linked
with a node sensor station composed of a localization
device BLE Beacon), eventually enriched with QR or
NFC tag to improve locality visibility and based on
the Mobile First paradigm.
Each SB allows mobile users to access stored
data.
SB is a micro server devoted to three main tasks:
listen data sent by connected sensor;
store data in database MySQL or NoSQL
(InfluxDB);
enable web based access to stored data.
The SB is realized by Raspberry Pi 2 - Model B.
Raspberry Pi is a fully-functional single-board
computer with a Broadcom processor. It as
programmable I/O pins where you can attach physical
devices and sensors.
Main Features:
CPU: 900 MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7;
RAM:1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM
Raspberry Pi 2 can run as Operating System the
full range of ARM GNU/Linux distributions.
Figure 1: STREET WEB (1 STBs): working scenario of
mobile users.
3 MOBILE FIRST
ARCHITECTURE
Traditional web design approaches often strongly
depend upon desktop interfaces, which could be hard
to adapt for smartphone and mobile devices. It is a
common practice to develop applications by starting
from the overall set of functionalities put on the
desktop interface and in a subsequent phase mobile
requirements are addressed.
Responsive Web Design (RWD) allows to adapt a
website’s layout for multiple screen resolutions
utilizing:
Fluid grids that ebb and flow with a devices’
screen size;
Flexible images and media that keep content
intact on any resolution;
Media queries allowing designs to adapt by
establishing dimension breakpoints.
Figure 2: MobileFirst Architecture STBs.
However RWD strategies give a solution for
particular cases such as menu, images and so on.
WIS 2016 - Special Session on New Trends in Web Intelligence and Services
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Recently it is becoming a common practice,
instead, to develop by starting from existing mobile
applications already optimized1 for mobile devices,
with the aim to furnish a complete solution without
using a desktop first approach.
This strategy, called “MobileFirst”, therefore
reverses the engineering development phases by
starting from a native mobile application schema.
This is meaningful in smart environments scenarios
context (IoT) where mobile users interact with
sensors (Egger, 2013; Jaraba et al., 2010; Kortuem et
al., 2010).
MobileFirst approach is a methodology created by
Luke Wroblewski (Wroblewski, 2011) for
Responsive Web Design. It highlights the need to
prioritize the mobile context when creating user
experiences.
The Mobile First Architecture is one of the main
solution which provides integration functionality
through its adapter mechanism. Mobile First adapters
are components that are deployed to the server on the
Mobile First platform to access enterprise services.
They serve as a mediator or gateway between mobile
applications and enterprise systems, receiving
requests from mobile apps and returning to them the
data fetched from the enterprise. The Mobile First
platform enable you to integrate cloud applications
quickly, reducing integration costs, and optimizing
resources and productivity
Mobile-First Features
Allows websites to reach more people (77% of the
world’s population has a mobile device).
Forces designers to focus on core content and
functionality.
Lets designers innovate and take advantage of
new technologies (geolocation, touch events and
more).
The Mobile First Architecture shown in Figure n.2
is one of the main solution which provides integration
functionality through its adapter mechanism.
Mobile First adapters are components that are
deployed to the server on the Mobile First platform to
access enterprise services. They serve as a mediator
or gateway between mobile applications and
enterprise systems, receiving requests from mobile
apps and returning to them the data fetched from the
enterprise. The Mobile First platform enable you to
integrate cloud applications quickly, reducing
integration costs, and optimizing resources and
productivity.
4 SMART SCENARIO USE CASES
WITH STREET WEB
In the following we want explore different applicative
examples of Street Web derived from Smart Tourism
research field.
The result is that by means of same framework it
is possible to obtain two different solutions (smart
museum and smart shop centre) which could be
integrated in a third one resulting in a street web for
complete smart tourism solution useful for historical
centres such as old towns.
A. Smart Museum
Figure 3 deals with a Smart Museum scenario,
where Street Web may support the interaction
between museum visitors and artworks. The system
uses Beacons, deployed in the museum environment,
and NFC Tags, storing data on the corresponding
artwork, to deliver information based on proximity
and to help visitor navigate through the museum to
look at the artworks they most want to see.
Figure 3: Street Web in a Smart Museum.
B. Smart Shopping Centre
Figure 4 shows a possible Smart Shopping Centre
Scenario. In this case Street Web uses Beacons to
detect nearby smartphones and send them media such
as ads, coupons or supplementary product
information. They can also be used to collect
information about consumers.
Street Web - A Framework for “Web on the Road” Smart Services
301
Figure 4: Street Web marketing.
C. Smart Historical Towns
Figure 5 shows the more general use of Street Web in
a small town.
Figure 5: Small Town Street Web.
5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
In this paper we have introduced Street Web a
network of special micro server, called Smart Box
(SB), placed in a touristic area with monuments
(historical centres, museums, archaeological sites,
etc.), to provide multimedia content (texts, images,
audio, video, hypertext, hypermedia, etc.) for tourists
equipped with smartphone.
Moreover we have introduced Mobile First, a
new approach for developing web applications in
smart environments. As example Street Web has been
applied in different cultural scenarios for many
touristic purposes.
We have shown that Street Web, thanks to its
features:
hardware architecture, composed of a network
of different nodes called Smart Box (SB), each
representing a complete working station with
localization device (BLE Beacon), eventually
enriched with QR or NFC tag
a user interface based on the Mobile First
paradigm, makes possible to implement smart
web services without remote internet access,
working as a geo based Distributed Local
Storage system,
The next step is the integration of Augmented
Reality (AR) to allow the overlaying of additional
virtual elements on the immediate physical
environments that users see.
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