Internet of Things 2008

End of March, I visited the Internet of Things 2008 conference in Zurich. The conference was an interesting mix of business and research people, discussing the Internet of Things around RFID and beyond.

I was invited to talk about the challenges ahead for the Internet at large, driven by the increasing cross-value chain collaboration that is driven forward not only but in particular by RFID.

In this talk, I tried to make the point that the discussion around Internet of Things, Internet of Services, and Internet of whatever is counterproductive and an indication of today’s still prevailing ignorance and inability to consider the Internet as a large-scale system that requires system solutions. I put forward a suggestion for overcoming this silo-ed thinking through an architectural vision called tussle networking, which has been presented earlier in this blog. This vision envisages a collaborative environment in which concerns of participants are captured (through intelligent methods found in, e.g., context awareness) and expressed through explicit policies, executed by a system centered around information, its provisioning, representation and reasoning over.

It was certainly a different view in this conference, creating interesting debate at the end of the presentation. You can find the slides of my presentation here.