Syed Shariyar Murtaza
Internet-Draft February 8, 2004
Expires: August 8, 2004
Web OF Physical Objects Uniform Resource Identifiers
draft-shariyar-wop-uri-00
Status of this Memo
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Abstract
This document define Uniform Resource Identifiers for Physical
Objects .It provides a proposal for the implementation of the
Concept, Physical resources should be accessible over the
Internet and an information object is on the web if it can have
a URI . People should be able to access the physical resources,
they possess ,from anywhere in the world e.g. accessing a car from
a remote location.
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Table of Contents
1. WHY URI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2. The Domain Name System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
3. URI Scheme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4. Elaborating The Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
5. Mechanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
5.1 Person-To-Appliances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
5.2 Secure Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5.3 Where And How . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5.4 Attributes,Properties And Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.5 Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5.6 Mapping Of URIS To IP Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
5.7 Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5.8 Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5.9 Persons-To-Persons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5.10 Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
6.0 Generic URI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
7.0 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
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1.WHY URI?
Before moving on ,the question why should physical resources
be allocated URIs for accessing them on the Internet has the
following answer.
" An information object is "on the web" if it has a URI.
Objects which have URIs are sometimes known as 'First Class Objects'
(FCOs). The Web works best when any information object of value and
identity is a first class object.If something does not have a URI,
you can't refer to it, and the power of the Web is the less for that[6]
2. THE DOMAIN NAME SYSTEM
Conceptually the Internet is partitioned into different top-level
domains and each domain encompasses many hosts. This is shown in fig 1.
here each top node represents a top-level domain, which covers many hosts.
Each host is a leaf and represents a single host or it contains hundreds
of host within it.e,g mail.yahoo.com, groups.yahoo.com and so on [1].
<-------Generic------------> | |<--Countries-->
ROOT
___________________|________________________
| | | | | | | | |
COM EDU GOV MIL ORG NET INT us pk . . .
| |
Yahoo ku
.
| |
|
mail groups
.
Fig 1 A portion of Internet domain Namespace [1]
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Now if this domain name system is extended to one more domain
,which could provide the network addresses of the physical resources
in the world then the axioms
Axiom 0: Universality 1
Any resource anywhere can be given a URI
Axiom 0a: Universality 2
Any resource of significance should be given a URI[6]
could be implemented as well. Physical resources could be
accessed through the already existing Internet and World Wide Web
could be utilized to its full potential.
The extended hierarchy is shown in figure 2
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<-----------Generic------------> | |<--Countries-->
ROOT
________________________|________________________
| | | | | | | | | |
WPO COM EDU GOV MIL ORG NET INT us pk . . .
| | |
pk yahoo ku
..
| | |
|
krh mail groups
..
..
|
ID
|
Car-01
Fig 2 An extended Portion of Internet Domain Name Space
Here WPO stands for A Web Of Physical Objects, pk represents
country Pakistan, krh represents city Karachi, ID represents the
social security number or national identity card number of a person
and Car-01 is identifier of the car for that person. So that it can
be accessed over the web and its properties can be manipulated, but
for this to be happened some protocol is needed.
3. URI SCHEME
The main question here is the URI scheme or the accessible protocol
for this domain?
As HTTP is already a well established URI scheme. Here it would be
best to utilize the already existing scheme rather than developing a
separate scheme and designed everything for it from the scratch.
A feature of HTTP is the typing and negotiation of data representation,
allowing systems to be built independently of the data being transferred.
HTTP is also used as a generic protocol for communication between user
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agents and proxies/gateways to other Internet systems, including those supported by
the SMTP, NNTP, FTP, and Gopher.
In this way, HTTP allows basic hypermedia access to resources
available from diverse applications.[2]
4. ELABORATING THE PERSPECTIVE
To elaborate on the perspective of new domain and URI for the
web of physical objects, assume the following scenarios.
Consider a person possessing a home with different kinds of
appliances,along with a car. This person leaves his home for few
days to some other city or a hill sport. On the way he remembers that
he forgot to turn his fridge off,to lock his cupboard, he wants to
check if there are any intruders in his home or if he is coming back
he wants to turn his bed room Air Condition on from a short distance.
Or consider an organization having an office building/buildings
and a CEO of the organization wants to check for the security of the
organization files or CDs by checking the locks of the cupboard of his
room from the remote place or a head peon of organization wants to check
for the status of the windows and doors of the office, either open or close,
from his home. Or consider an old man or young kid leave from his home
without notifying the Guardian of the home. When the Guardian notices the
absence of the child or old man, he wants to find him. (Although, a lot
of research is being carried out on this chapters, which is mostly related
to the architecture and framework. But here the main concern is the
identification of devices and a uniform higher level communication so
that already existing web and these architectures could be utilized to
their full potential.)
Thus there are three possible scenarios for communication , the
mechanism by which these communications can proceed is explained below.
5. MECHANISMS
The Possible mechanisms are explained below.
5.1. PERSON-TO-APPLIANCES
In Person to appliances communication the person would want to
communicate with the appliances, he has. For this there is a top level domain
called WPO, A Web of Physical Objects, for the accessibility of physical
objects through the web. But there are some requirements for it.
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*A person should have a unique identifier such as social security
number or National Identification Card Number.
* An appliance should have a unique id as well with reference to or
within the scope of unique identification of person.
With this unique number such as ID-523-82-070376 and a unique id for
appliance such as TV01, CAR01, AC01, he/she could access his home
appliances from anywhere.
Then the hierarchy will be
ROOT
_______|________
| |
| |
.WPO other domains
|
|
pk
|
|
krh
|
|
0092-523-82-070376
___________|_________________________________________
| | | |
| | | |
TV001 FRG001 Car001
OBJn
http:// TV001.252382070376.krh.pk.wpo
Fig 3 Person-To-Appliance Communication
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What does this mean? This means that there is a user with
NationalID card number 52381070376, country (Pakistan), city Karachi
and that user can access his/her tv001 from a remote place with this
URI.But this access should be secure, so that only this person can
manipulate its properties.
5.2. SECURE ACCESS
For a secure access such that only the user would be able to
access his/her TV not every one else, the user id and password should
be used for the accessing, such that
http:// tv001.52382070376.krh.pk.wpo?uid=shary&pwd=xc4532fg
This means that there is a user shary with some encrypted
password and wants to access the tv001 of the person with ID52382070376.
This will not only allow secure access but it will also allow the
management of multiple users on the same device or in other words the
concept of shared devices can easily be manipulated.
Like a software application, there could be many users of same
application but the difference lies in their shared level access.
Usually, there is an application or system administrator who possesses
the majority of the rights and allows or creates other users to access
the system.Similarly, in terms of physical resource there should be
multiple users of the same resource or physical object and there must
be an Object Administrator who will work similarly as an Application
Administrator and will be able to access the resource through
http://tv001.009252382070376.krh.pk.wpo?uid=administrator&pwd=ucA657ghj
It depends on this administrator allow other users full access or
just a limited access.
5.3. WHERE AND HOW:
Where this administrator can create these users, where would
this secure authentication be processed and where should this query
travel on the net?Object Administrator should be able to create users
or allow different kind of privileges to users either from the home
server or directly from the interface of the device and he/she should
create and map them to the device form his home server. It laso fulfills
the following axiom
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AXIOM 2b
the significance of identity for a given URI is determined by the
person who owns the URI, who first determined what it points to. [6]
As there is a name server in case of other domains similarly
a name server here should function in the same way. All the queries
relating to the physical objects will be directed towards the nearest
wpo name servers which then process and in case of no matching query
direct it to the other wpo server and so on ,finally to the home server
of the identifier(e.g. 52382070376).The home server is the main server
where all the authentications will be carried out. It is not necessary
that it should be a desktop server it could be any microchip .As the
technology is progressing it is no longer a science fiction any more.
With this home server user would be able to create the users of their
appliances with different kinds of privileges.
5.4. ATTRIBUTES, PROPERTIES AND METHODS
So far nothing has been discussed on the topic of communication
language between these devices and how he user would be able to
control his home from far away places. How would the user access
the attributes, properties and methods of the physical objects?
The language of communication should be XML and it should be
used to access the properties and methods of Physical objects.
Because it is already progressing and becoming a standard for B2B
(Business to Business), B2P (Business To Person) and A2A (Application
to Application) .RDF (Resource Description Framework) is also based
on the XML and with the XML as communication language it can be used
as well . Infect the use of RDF will help web agents in understandings
the semantics and devices will be able to communicate with each other
via web agents. Lots of theory discussed till now, lets move on to
some examples.
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5.5 EXAMPLES
In the following example user with ID 52382070376 is accessing
his/her TV number 1.
http://tv001.52382070376.krh.pk.wpo?uid=administrator&pwd=ucA657ghj
After the authentication the device such as tv01 should return an
XML file
Philips-AE-400
100
off
NULL< TVs:TUNETOCHANNEL/t>
Here this XML file is an RDF document, which explains that tv001
of person with national identity card number 52382070376 has model
Philips-AE-400, channels 400 and at the moment it is in off mode and
there is no channel on display.
The browser at the client side should read this XML and visualize
it to for the client while the user at the client side will be able to
send the reply back to the home server such as this.
< TVs:MODEL> Philips-AE-400
< TVs:CHANNELS> 100
< TVs:STATUS> on
< TVs:TUNETOCHANNEL> CNN < TVs:TUNETOCHANNEL/t>
This means that user wants to turn his TV on and tune to channel CNN.
But this is not the end of the story, the user could create his own
schema, develop his own personal ontology as the semantic web community
focuses on.
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Consider this person also has a microwave oven which can download the
recipe of cooking dishes from a cooking food website and cook the food
automatically with different ingredients present in it. Now suppose this
person creates a new dish and he wants to share his recipe with his
neighbors microwave oven.
(Biryani is a popular rice meal in subcontinent)
xmlns:ALMONDBIRYANI ="http://mcw001.52382070376.pk.wop/cookingrecipe/almondbiryani#">
0.5 kg
< PRF:PHONE> 092-021-6311877
This shows the profile for a person.
One other very important thing is the location of that person,
where he/she is. But it should be available to only authenticated users
such as the guardian as explained previously.
http://loc.52382070376.krh.pk.wop/uid=Guardian&pwd=gfdh567hg
Which should return an XML file mentioning the location of the device
(here the name of device is loc) and that file could be.
Karachi
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Central
6. GENERIC URI
So the generic URI is (Since the term URI is used throughout this
document, but according to [3], it is a URL "Uniform Resource Locator" (URL)
which refers to the subset of URI that identify resources via a
representation of their primary access mechanism (e.g., their network
"location"), rather than identifying the resource by name or by some other
attribute(s) of that resource.)
The hierarchy is shown in figure 4
ROOT
__________|______________
| |
.WPO Other domains
|
|
COUNTRY
|
|
CITY
|
|
IDENTIFICATION
|
|
PHYSICAL RESOURCE
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WHERE
Country = Countrys name acronym
(pk / uk / us etc )
City = Citys name acronym
Identification = National Identity Card Number /
Social Security Number /
Organization Name
Physical Resource= Unique device ID with in the scope of identification.
While the URI Scheme is Hyper Text Transfer Protocol HTTP.
7.0 CONCLUSION
Because URIs are needed everywhere RDF, ontologies,web services
or XML and web agents can roam from device to device with the help of URI.
Use of URIs for device identification would not only allow
the easy manipulation of that device from far away places but it will also
help in easy device discovery for web agents, use of personal schemas,
defining of the ontology by individuals which will be reused by others,
which in th end will finally result in the development of Ubiquitously
Semantic Web.Finally
If something does not have a URI, you can't refer to it, and
the power of the Web is the less for that[4]
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REFERENCES
[1] Andrew S Tanenbaum, Computer Networks,3rd Edititon
[2] R. Fielding,UC Irvine, J. Gettys, J. Mogul, H. Frystyk, L. Masinter,P. Leach ,
T. Berners-Lee, HTTP 1.1, RFC 2616, June 1999
[3] T. Berners-Lee ,R. Fielding, U.C. Irvine, L. Masinter , Uniform Resource Identifiers
(URI): Generic Syntax, August 1998
[4] Sean B. Palmer, The Semantic Web: An Introduction, http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro/,
September 2001
[5] Tim BL Primer, Getting into RDF & Semantic Web using N3,
http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer
[6] Tim Berners-Lee, Universal Resource Identifiers-Axioms of Web Architecture ,
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html, December,1996
[7] Robert Grimm, System Support for Pervasive Application,
http://www.cs.nyu.edu/rgrimm/publications.html, 2002
AUTHOR'S ADDRESS
Syed Shariyar Murtaza
Email: syedshariyar@yahoo.com
Paper Mail: R-300/15 Federal B Area
Karachi. Pakistan
Phone: 092-021-6311877