Picture by Andrew Turner's presentation "Drupal and the Geospatial Web"

Internet of Things

A rather old concept is becoming increasingly real thanks to RFID technology. I have previously blogged about its potential and consequences for development. RFID chips can be attached as stickers to objects, which then can disclose or collect information.
Over at the ReadWritewWeb blog there is a rather funny example of a social tennis racket, which could tell its story – where, with who and how it was played – with the help of such technology.
The logistic sector is using these technologies on a wide scale to track their packages, and soon millions of more objects will be connected to the Internet in the same way.

Location based information

Location based services have been around for a while, but it is lately when they are actually being tacked up. With services such as Foursquare or Gwozilla we not only send our location, but lots of additional information that is around the location. This is an amazing business concept, where users collect “for free” huge piles of information with all sorts of information:

• Location of bars, restaurants, shops, clubs
• An evaluation when a user sends statuses and comments
• Massive social profiles of movements and behaviors.

No surprise Twitter and Facebook have started to send their users updates from specific locations. I wrote a while ago about how you can see, on the example of Google Buzz, that such services are used around the world even in countries you would not imagine.

GPS is included in more and more devices, such as cars, mobile phones, bicycles and even washing powder (!).

World of sensors

Another approach to get huge amounts of data is through sensors, which measure all sorts of factors from our environment. The idea is that soon low-cost sensors will be available, for example, to measure noise, air quality or one’s physical condition. Such sensors can also be RFID chips, but can go even further. These sensors could be included in a watch or mobile phone; this way millions of people can deliver real time information. Sounds like science fiction, but there are already some crowdsourcing projects “using humans as sensors“. Citypulse wants to measure the air quality though the contributions from pedestrians.  And with a smart phone it is easy to join a project to measure the noise level worldwide.

The senseable city lab from MIT using such methods. For example, the “Trash Track” project, where 3000 sensors were added to trash bags to analyze the different ways pieces of trash are taken through the disposal chain.

Implications

The list can be easily extended; please add some further methods in the comment section. But why have I written this list? Because I want to describe how pervasive the process has gone and that it has had far reaching consequences, which not everybody is aware of.

First, positively, these means extend the richness of data on the Internet available. Second, it can offer more and better information faster. Third, thanks to open source and fairly cheap web services these tools become available for many more people. And fourth, if it is offered as open data to everyone, it can help create useful web services. I will elaborate further on user scenarios in upcoming posts.

However, I also have a lot of concerns and questions. What about ownership, often the lines blur. Who owns the data and to which I as an individual control the information about me anymore? Where does this data collection lead to in a few years time, when companies like Foursquare with millions of social profile data are in complete different hands? Do we really need to digitize everything that is possibly modifiable?

Michael Gurstein has a great post, in which he expresses concerns that open data might only help the people, who already have an information advantage (e.g. access, research skills).

What is the sense of collecting all this huge amounts of data? Or is a lot of that data collection nonsense, because it limits or has even little or no meaningfulness? I will elaborate further on these questions in my next posts.

First part of the post.

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The Internet of Things is a rather old story within the web. But through simple, low-cost technology such as RFID chips (Radio Frequency Identification Tags) volunteers worldwide gain another potentially powerful monitoring instrument. Such crowdsourcing efforts can unseal environmental damage, give valuable data to advocacy organizations and development projects.

Internet of Things
Originally, the Internet of Things was thought for modern household. Household appliances are connected to the Internet, so that the refrigerator sends out a message when it is running out of orange juice or eggs, for example. Not surprisingly this advancement in technology has not made a big impact nor made it to the daily life of millions as yet. Such technology are RFID chips, which are low-cost, simple stickers, which can be put on commodities.

Things become connected
Businesses such as logistic enterprises use them to follow each article or package easily. These little stickers can store information. So, for example, logistic companies use them to document the travel route of a package. You only need to scan the piece within the range of a few meters and then see where it comes from. Environmentalists use the same technology to monitor the route that logged down trees from the rainforest take.

Barcoding to save the tropical forest
According to TreeHugger: Will Barcoding Trees Save Tropical Forests? This video shows how these barcodes can be used to find out where trees are really originally from and whether they are protected or illegally cut down. In this case, however, it is offered by a company. Of course, such barcodes can be removed, but they can also be as small as only a few millimeters.

Crowdsourcing transparency
Imagine that volunteers worldwide could check how products go along the supply chain. Another interesting project in this regard is Sourcemap, a collective tool for transparency and sustainability, which is looking into the unsealing of the supply chain of products. But this does not only have to be done through radio frequency identification technology. A project called Citizen Water works with inexpensive water quality test kits. Here, people check across any country the water quality, and then map the results in a transparent way in the Internet, to show the different levels of water quality in different areas.

So far, this technology has been used mainly by businesses or governments. Nowadays, more and more governments are planning on adding it to passports. Regarding privacy, these attempts are quite scary, since you as a customer or citizen cannot control what gets on or off thes echips nor who can or cannot read the stored information. It is time to use such technology for openness.

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