Re: Discovery API proposals: call for comments

Another use case is where you are away from home and want to access a 
device at home.  One example is the Meccano Spykee WiFi robot. You can 
access this remotely, drive it around your home, and even have a live 
chat with people there, including a video feed.

http://www.meccano.com/models/spykee-the-wifi-spy-robot.html/

This uses a proprietary solution, but suggests the following requirements:

   -  discovering a remote service behind a NAT/Firewall.
   -  establishing a control path (a two-way event stream)
   -  establishing a media stream (video & audio)
   -  user preferences controlling what can be discovered and by whom
   -  user preferences controlling who can bind to what services
   -  authentication for discovery and for service binding

Yet another use case is being able to use NFC (near field 
communications) for accessing various kinds of RFID tags or even phones 
that emulate such tags.  There are lots of possibilities, e.g. touch 
your phone to another phone to share information, or to use a card or 
phone to sign in or to pay for something.   This is a case where you 
want to discover a class of service, but may not know what interconnect 
technology is involved in a given context.

More generally, it is desirable to be able to constrain discovery by 
context, e.g. the class of service, the physical location, the ownership 
of device (John's TV or Wendy's printer).

It should be possible for the UI showing the results of discovery to be 
updated live to reflect services appearing and disappearing.

Discovery may have an impact on battery life, so you should be able to 
turn it on and off in a controllable way.

It is valuable to be able to instantiate a local object in the web 
page's scripting environment that exposes the service as an interface 
rather than requiring the web page script to directly manage the 
protocol needed for remote services.

In the webinos project we are busy trying these things out and will have 
plenty to demo at the next DAP F2F, although I doubt if it will be 
practical to bring the robot along, we may be able to drive it remotely 
though!

-- 
  Dave Raggett<dsr@w3.org>  http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett

Received on Wednesday, 21 September 2011 11:27:50 UTC