Towards a Social and Ubiquitous Web: A Model for Socio-technical Networks

The Web is to experience considerable growth by extending to physical devices, i.e. the so-called Web of Things (WoT). To make this growth sustainable, users need mechanisms for managing and interacting with large networks of devices and services. Existing search engines and mashup editors for the WoT partially address this problem by enabling developers and tech savvy users to search for "things" and connect them to one another. However, manually "wiring" large networks of things does not scale. Furthermore, static mashups cannot adapt to dynamic environments. Our approach is to apply the social network metaphor to the WoT to create a semantic socio-technical overlay that may be reliably processed and used by both people and things. Things can crawl this overlay to discover one another, but also manipulate it such that they may wire themselves. In this paper, we introduce a model for socio-technical networks (STNs). We apply this model to wrap up Twitter and Facebook as STNs, and to develop ThingsNet, our own prototype STN platform. Finally, we present a software client that uses the STN model to function across all three platforms, as well as any other platforms that may be translated to this model.