Smart Web Services (SmartWS) -- The Future of Services on the Web
This work addresses interoperability and automation issues in the Web of Things, particularly for developers and users in domains like healthcare, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing Web standards without introducing a fundamentally new paradigm.
The paper tackles the challenge of integrating diverse devices and real-world objects into the Web of Things by proposing Smart Web Services (SmartWS), which encapsulate intelligence for autonomous task execution, and presents a reference implementation framework, a medical use case, and a maturity model.
The past few years have been marked by an increased use of sensor technologies, abundant availability of mobile devices, and growing popularity of wearables, which enable the direct integration of their data as part of rich client applications. Despite the potential and added value that such aggregate applications bring, the implementations are usually custom solutions for particular use cases and do not support easy integration of further devices. To this end, the vision of the Web of Things (WoT) is to leverage Web standards in order to interconnect all types of devices and real-world objects, and thus to make them a part of the World Wide Web (WWW) and provide overall interoperability. In this context we introduce Smart Web Services (SmartWS) that not only provide remote access to resources and functionalities, by relying on standard communication protocols, but also encapsulate `intelligence'. Smartness features can include, for instance, context-based adaptation, cognition, inference and rules that implement autonomous decision logic in order to realize services that automatically perform tasks on behalf of the users, without requiring their explicit involvement. In this paper, we present the key characteristics of SmartWS, and introduce a reference implementation framework. Furthermore, we describe a specific use case for implementing SmartWS in the medical domain and specify a maturity model for determining the quality and usability of SmartWS.