The number of objects, such as smartphones, tablets, cars, televisions, able to connect to the Internet to seek/provide services is rapidly increasing, leading to the so called Internet of Things (IoT).
The IoT includes a growing number of objects with different levels of intelligence identified by addressing schemes that provide unique services to end users through standard communication protocols; their number will soon reach hundreds of billions of elements that interact in an extremely heterogeneous way in terms of requirements, behavior and ability. In this scenario, communication will be of different types (users-objects but also objects-objects), so the introduction of the concept of the virtual object, which is a digital representation of physical objects, will help to address such heterogeneity by taking part in the communications as their substitute. These virtual entities will produce and consume services, work together towards common goals and should be integrated with all the other services of the Internet.
The project SocialMobility – Applicazione della Social Internet of Things alla Mobilità, exploits the concept of a Social IoT (SIoT), which is intended as a social network where every node is an object capable of establishing social relationships with other things in an autonomous way according to rules set by the owner. The social network of heterogeneous devices is shaped to form a social graph of resources, where the nodes of the graph are represented by the devices themselves, the links are their social relations and the weights of these links express the degree of social interaction between devices/sensors, represented by the number of interactions between them. The creation of social relationships among objects leads to the creation of social structures that maximize the benefits in terms of service discovery, event filtering, trustworthiness management and exploitation of data. SocialMobility aims to implement an innovative platform based on the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) allowing, through an integrated approach based on the concept of social network among objects, the sharing of information on the movement of people, vehicles and objects.
Budget: 150000 €
Funding: RAS
Duration: 2014-2015
Research Area: Social Mobility
Principal Investigator: Luigi Atzori