SBIR Phase I: Developing a Conversational Commons for the Internet of Things

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is that the model of a universal, user-facing commercially run "commons" results in an easier to use dynamic and creative Internet of Things, with more power for users and more sales for manufacturers. The commons allows devices of many protocols to publish, subscribe and react to updates from one other in a way that is open to manufacturers and visible/comprehensible to normal Internet Users. Most of the largest Internet companies (including in auctions, social media and ecommerce) constitute conceptually similar models in which a central entity helps support the relationships between consumers, or between consumers and manufacturers/sellers. This project aims to bring similar efficiencies, power and ease of use to the network-connected devices of the next few decades, with a view to capturing some of the value it creates for manufacturers and users in the process (as e-commerce, social media and auctions platforms have before). This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is focused on creating interoperability between all devices at the level of a user interface and in such a way that a normal Internet User can understand. At present, limited sub-sets of devices may be interoperable at some levels of their protocol, and may be able to react to one or extend their networks. But this interoperability does not extend to all devices, and it does not extend to the user interface. A normal person cannot make any two devices interact with one another without resorting to computer programming. The project proposes that the creation of a centralized real-time-messaging-based "commons" in which devices (i) publish their status in both human readable language and a parallel extensible data format, and (ii) can register ways for their major functions to be triggered which creates a space in which any device can react to state changes in another. The project aims to demonstrate that (i) the core statuses of devices can be expressed and easily published in these real-time human-readable/data messages, that (ii) the data structure can comprise both core data types and a looser, name-spaced set of data types, that (iii) a real-time rules engine can trigger a device to action when a set of arbitrary criteria occur, and that (iv) these criteria and responses can be created through a comparatively simple user interface.