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

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.

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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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