Keynote talk: Augmented, adaptive, accessible, and inclusive things

Abstract

In this new age of the Internet of Things (IoT) people and things are increasingly immersed in a computing environment that is aimed to simplify and improve daily activities. The Web of Things (WoT) is near to become a W3C Recommendation with the aim to support semantic interoperability across IoT platforms by providing a common interaction model independent of the underlying protocols. In this talk, I will illustrate the main principles of the WoT paradigm and then I will discuss the issue of Accessibility. Following on from the WoT concept of Things as virtual representations of physical digital things and also non-digital things, I will introduce an approach where we envision an Adaptive Web of Things as a mean to increase accessibility and usability of real world objects. The idea is that through the virtualization of physical objects, even objects which are not natively accessible can be augmented to become accessible and inclusive if proper adaptations are performed in order to fit the user’s needs