In the rapidly ageing world, evolving information and communication technologies are both welcomed as useful tools and also criticized as an important reason for social exclusion. This is because of the difficulty to retrieve required information and services from the volume of information and plethora of services available on the Web. So it is needed to develop Smart Systems that will provide required information that is easily accessible to elder people with varying capacities and resources. The central concern is to have Smart systems to foster active ageing by staying connected with events, people and getting timely, practical information to manage life and meet personal needs. This paper provides the design of a RESTful Smart System composed of different web services according to the requirement which will give assistance to the elder citizens in their daily life. To achieve a user friendly and easily accessible interface for the elder citizens the Hypermedia control defined in REST paradigm is also analyzed which provides the way to drive the users from one state to another through links.
The challenges of ageing population growth, demographic change, urbanization and
resource depletion mean that the world’s great cities need to adapt to survive and
thrive over the coming decades. As informed by WHO [
We are moving towards urban superorganisms, where we can use ICT devices and
unique human capabilities for the wellbeing of our society by collectively sharing real
time information and taking actions accordingly [
In today’s ICT world, the growing trend in software architecture is to build Web Services that are available as components in the distributed environment of the Internet. Therefore, applications are to be assembled from a set of appropriate Web services. Seamless composition of Web services has enormous potential in streamlining application integration even at personal level. The diversity of various Web Services or Web APIs makes difficult choosing the correct ones to fulfill the user needs. To Perform Service Integration we need to discover access, control and coordinate different services. It is impossible to make different Web Services to interoperate if there are no agreements or guidelines on how communication should happen. This problem can be solved by finding a common way of communicating between services. Service Integration also requires an appropriate way of discovering and selecting services where the discovery is the activity of locating a machineprocessable description of a Web Service that meets certain functional criteria and selection is the activity of evaluating the discovered services in order to identify the ones that fulfill a set of nonfunctional properties requested by the actual user. Moreover, the coordination among the selected services and the functionality of the services to fulfill the user requirements are needed. From this discussion some questions arises: a) How Composition of heterogeneous Web Services can be done? b) How Composition of services can improve the quality of elder people’s life and feel them socially included? c) How Smart Systems can help to drive the user in an easy way? In this paper, these questions have been analyzed to show how to compose the available Web APIs and Web Services to enhance the social inclusion of the ageing society. This can be done by providing the way to get real time information from heterogeneous sources like social networks, community sites etc. by Web Services and Web APIs. Existing Web Services, Web APIs and Social Networks have been considered in an example scenario. The aim is to enable Service composition by exploiting existing standard such as HTTP methods, URI templates, and Hypermedia control known as REST approach to support users in completing a task without knowing the system a priori.
Motivation behind this work is to provide a Smart System composed of different services according to the requirement which will give assistance to the elder citizens in their daily life. Due to the difficulty the elder people face in retrieving information from the heterogeneous sources of information available on the web, the rapidly evolving information and communication technologies are criticized as instruments of social exclusion. Regardless of the variety of communication choices and the volume of information available, the central concern is to have relevant information that is readily accessible to elder people with varying capacities and resources. Information materials and communication technologies should be adapted to suit diverse perceptual, intellectual and cultural needs. Staying connected with events and people and getting timely, practical information to manage life and meet personal needs is vital for active ageing. So it is needed to develop Smart Systems to foster active ageing. Also considering the Smart City concepts, the transportation systems need to be improved to provide Web based transportation facilities where people can find their required information in an easy way. So there is an increasing interest in the role that information and communications technologies could play in transforming existing transportation systems into web enabled systems to support future smart cities. But to our best knowledge, as yet, few cities have fully grasped this idea.
The rest of the paper discusses on integrating data from different sources which will be gathered by invoking different Web Services and APIs through standardized interfaces by the Smart System to fulfill its task. To investigate the issue, two scenarios have been discussed that differentiate between user control activities, where users are asked to invoke different types of services to fulfill a composite task, and a Smart System, where users invoke a single composite service without further interaction. 2
To motivate our work, we refer to a real-world use case scenario that outlines challenges that are currently not fully addressed for the ageing society context at our best knowledge. Paper [121] shows how Web services can become smarter and deliver more complex functionality by gathering information from sensors and traditional services with minimal human intervention, using inter-linkage of sensor data with hypermedia controls. We follow a similar approach to address elder people needs. The aim is to provide a simple, flexible, and dynamic solution to improve the quality of elder people’s life by addressing some challenges in transportation systems. The technical solution will exploit the REST architectural approach. We believe that the understanding of this scenario, related problems and proposed solution will show the research directions in designing the Smart Systems by composing heterogeneous Web Services and Web APIs. 2.1
Let’s consider two possible implementations of a scenario in which a user, let’s say Mrs. Rossi, wants to go to a place near Piazza Duomo in Milan by public transport. She looks for route directions and other related information like access facilities or other alternative routes. In the first version, the user has to interact with different Web Services of different types, such as Web Services like ATM, community sites like grey-panthers, social networks like facebook etc. To get the realtime information some Web Services use sensors which has been also included in this scenario. In the second version, a Smart service with composite capabilities minimizes the user interaction by transferring the control from the user to the service. The control of the Smart System will be achieved by providing involved services with RESTful interfaces to make interaction and control similar to the one already in use on the Web and therefore already familiar to both users and developers.
Use Case Scenario with User Control. As depicted in Fig 1, first Mrs. Rossi searches information to go to a place near Piazza Duomo. She looks for the address in the Location API and invokes the ATM Web Service to get the information about the route direction and time schedule. As she has some knee problems she also wants to know whether there is an elevator in the subway station through which she has to reach her destination, and, most important, if the elevetor is working. But as the ATM service doesn’t provide realtime complete information, she searches community sites like grey-panther or Facebook for real time information about routes, delays and elevators. If the station doesn’t have a working elevator then the user needs to choose an alternative route by bus or tram.
Fig 1: Use Case scenario with user control
changed to minimize the user control to introduce Smart Transportation System. The user should be able to invoke a single smart service to collect all needed information to reach the destination. As shown in Fig 2, she invokes the Smart Transportation System that in turn interacts with the required services: (i) invokes the Location API to get the location of the address, (ii) invokes the ATM Service to get the route and time schedule, (iii) connects to social networks like Facebook to get real time information about delays and elevators informed by connected people. With this information she can decide which is the best route to follow to reach her destination. Furthermore, the Smart Transportation System updates these information in the greypanthers’ Facebook wall to share real time and reliable information helpful for the Elder people.
Fig 2: Use Case Scenario Based on a Smart System. 3
The need of global availability and sharing of huge amount of information through various kinds of heterogeneous devices and services has changed the reference scenario for the development of Web scale applications. The consequent growing complexity and increasing request of adaptive services has made manual management impractical. A possible answer toward smart systems is to make services selfmanageable by achieving awareness of the target things’ or the applications’ physical environment or situations to respond proactively and intelligently. To tackle the problem from a technology point of view, a first effort should be the definition of a common protocol to foster automatic interoperability. The adoption of RESTful architecture could be the right answer by providing standard interfaces and hypermedia driven interactions to existing services. The major advantage is the use of HTTP methods that enable for the use of standard tolls to navigate, interact and compose services. These technological aspects have been analyzed to show how the Transportation System can become smarter and deliver more complex functionality by gathering information from heterogeneous services with minimal human intervention using hypermedia controls. 3.1
In order to increase the system interoperability, the Smart Transportation System has
been designed according to the Resource-Oriented Architecture that is devoted to
manage distributed, heterogeneous resources in which client applications interact
directly with the resources, by following the REST principles [
The Smart system is expected to be seamlessly adapting, in a fully autonomic way, to different operational conditions to fulfill the user requirements. Autonomous actions need to be performed by enabled devices, sensors and/or services with different levels of capabilities. The Smart Transportation System needs to access and control services that use different technologies in the communication which make interactions and integrations troublesome. This problem can be addressed by employing a common architectural style for implementing the involved interfaces. We propose to adopt the REST approach because interoperability is fostered by the use of standard technologies, the stateless RESTful interactions support scalability, and hypermedia controls reduce coupling between components by driving clients’ interaction. Moreover, REST principles provide the opportunity to reuse and generalize the component interfaces, reduce interaction latency, enforce security, and encapsulate legacy systems by using intermediary components. 3.2
By employing a RESTful interface to the involved services it is possible to provide hypermedia driven interactions. REST approach uses HTTP as a way of communication between the services and the client-service interactions that are done using HTTP methods. For example to hire a car service the user can follow the actions like: Invokes the service for retrieving information about car hiring using GET; Requests for a booking by POSTing a request; Updates or cancels the booking by using PATCH/DELETE; Retrieves booking information, to know the status by using GET. Use of HTTP methods and the multiple representations provides a way to drive users from one state to the next state without knowing the system a priori. For example, while the request from the client side is made for the information about car hiring using GET, the service provides the available information and also the links for booking in the representation. Then the client can select the booking option to reserve the car in a specific date and time. This request is made by using POST method and upon reception of the request, the services creates a booking request resource, decides whether the booking will be accepted, rejected or pending, and sends the HTTP response to the client. Upon successful creation of the resource, the response status code is 201 Created, and the Location header identifies its URI. The representation provides the links for updating, canceling or getting the information about booking by using PATCH, DELETE and GET respectively. Similar HTTP requests are used for actions to fulfill the user needs in the invocation of other services.
In today’s world the expectations of users are increasing towards connectivity and
social inclusion by the emerging of social-media-based services, like Facebook and
iTunes, that has been addressed as the evolving service in [
To show more focused, on-demand use of Web APIs, driven by functionality and
social parameters, paper [
In the domain of SOAP/WSDL services, messages are exchanged between
endpoints of published applications by using the Web as a universal transport
medium. In this way, the applications interact through the Web but remain “outside”
of the Web. In addition, SOAP is the single standardized message format in this
approach and messages are exchanged in both directions by using only one HTTP
verb (POST). In the literature, there are several papers that compare the SOAP and
the REST approaches (e.g., [
In [
There are several Web Services and APIs available to fulfill user needs by providing
real-time information or experiences of people. We propose the approach to compose
available Web Services and APIs in the context of Mobility to provide a Smart
Transportation System that fosters social inclusion. In the process of Service
Composition one of the important steps is to choose the right APIs. If two APIs are
offering same functionality then some other factors such as non functional properties
or social parameters are becoming decisive factors to pick the right one from the
plethora of Web Services and APIs available on the Web. Quality attributes such as
performance and ease-of-use exists within a social context which should be taken into
account creating personalized mashups and Service Composition [
To involve the people of a city in different activities it is important to provide Smart Systems that facilitates the service and information required by the user. People travelling in Milan are getting the facilities provided by Azienda Trasporti Milanesi (ATM) that also offers a Web API to provide route in map, time schedule and other information related to transportation around Milan city. The related services include Radiobus, an on-call minibus service; Guidami car sharing and BikeMi bike sharing services etc. There is a mobile application of this service to guide the users while they are travelling which is very much helpful for the users to move around. This City Service can be considered as an example of a Web Service API which can be combined with other services to provide required information for fulfilling the regular activities especially for elder people in their daily life and also the new travelers will be benefited. 5.2
There are some APIs available that provides the collective information and also
updates the real time information on the social networks. As an example the name of
an exciting API “moovit” [
By riding the public transport vehicle with this app open during the trip the user can anonymously share its location and speed. The user can also choose to actively contribute relevant reports such as overcrowding on the bus, an accident that causes delays or an inaccurate station location on the map. By sharing these information, the user can join together with the community to create the best real time public transport data and extract much more from the existing public transport infrastructure. As “moovit” is recognized as a user-generated platform, the real time information gets better as more people use it and share their information. This implies the use of Smart Transportation Systems in emerging social inclusion. 5.3
To enhance the social relationship among people one of the important way is to share information like interests, activities, backgrounds, or real-life connections. In today’s modernized world where most of the people are habituated to use Internet as their medium of interactions, Social media based services like Facebook or Twitter facilitates social inclusion by sharing their common interests. Online community services are sometimes considered as a social network service like GreyPanthers2 for Elder people where people can share information on its Facebook or Twitter page. Being engaged in the same community people can understand the problems that other people face and emphasis on sharing real time information that are helpful for the community. These media based services pave the path towards social inclusion by providing related information that are more reliable to them for accomplishing their daily activities. 2 http://www.grey-panthers.it/ Smart devices and social apps are becoming a part of everyday life that open up new and more efficient ways of social interactions. To enhance this issue the personalized web services composed of different services including social components are becoming a popular aspect. To provide an easy way for the clients without programming skill (e.g. elder people) to interact with the Smart System the client side interaction should be more user-friendly. It is possible by employing the RESTful interface through which the user easily moves from one link to another to complete their desired tasks. In this case they even do not need to know about the system a priori. Moreover, to compose the Web Services and APIs there should be an easy way to include different services to make a personalized or user driven System.
By composing the above discussed services and other services according to the requirement, it is possible to build a Smart Transportation System. To maximize the usefulness to the elder people, the proposed system provides a simple user interface with easy to learn and less functions to remember functionalities. As the proposed approach emphasizes to minimize the user interactions, the user does not have to interact with several Web Services to complete his task. While the user makes the request, the Smart System interacts with required Web Services and gives the results to the user and also provides the links to go further. Thus the user interaction with the Smart Transportation System is simple and the user does not need to know about the functionalities of all the involved Web Services. This proposed approach is useful for extending their activities in the society. Moreover, by sharing their experience with other people and participating in the community they are achieving the sense of social inclusion. 6
In this paper a step towards the social inclusion of Elder people has been made by defining a Smart Transportation System with minimum human interaction. The REST architectural style has been discussed to define the common interaction style between heterogeneous services by providing RESTful interfaces. This proposal shows how it is possible to design a system which fulfills the user needs by composing required services and getting real time information through media based services (e.g. social networks). In the ageing society context where an easy and user friendly interactions need to be considered, this approach helps elder people to participate in the social activities by getting related real time information and sharing their experiences through a simple user interface with hypermedia links to complete their required task. The future plan is to continue in the effort of extending the adoption of REST and Linked Data paradigms to foster the integration of Internet of Things, Internet of Services, and Internet of People by developing a common and interoperable platform on the existing Web infrastructure. Furthermore, we want to develop a Smart System composed of different services including social apps based on this proposal and validate it by getting feedback from elder people.