Re: iBeacon + LDP or ie: SoLiD

> On 22 May 2016, at 10:11, Timothy Holborn <timothy.holborn@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Looking into iBeacon technology and found the google offering [1] alongside the apple version.  
> 
> I'd rather have the infrastructure owned by the property owner and use linked-data more generically (rather than via service provider).  Any suggested links for existing solutions that are less service-provider / vendor tied? 

I think this requires an exploration of the business models. Vendors are already used to providing URIs for product support and marketing info, including special offers. The URI is for a web page, and in principle, the HTTP request accept header could used to request metadata separately from the web page. The question is what to do with this metadata and how it would benefit both you, the vendor and the merchant for the store with the beacon.

Receiving unsolicited and personalised ads when walking into a store may feel a little creepy, and possibly down right annoying. This would become something that is welcomed if you were able to set your preferences, so that you only got such ads when they are relevant to your current needs, and this didn’t involve a loss of privacy.

This is where personal agents can be of value, where you are happy to share personal information with the agent, that you would be uncomfortable with sharing with other parties. The agent can use this personal information to assess whether a particular service is something worthy of your attention.  Such agents could be locally based as apps on your phone, or they could be cloud based and capable of harnessing recent advances in AI for much more sophisticated capabilities.  This points to a market for personal agents.  Apple and Google are already moving in this direction, but it would be your choice when it comes to which vendor you select and how smart you want your personal agent to be.

In respect to the Web of Things Interest Group, beacons could be used by apps as a way to discover a thing and initiate machine to machine interaction with it. This is consistent with the role of personal agents, whether the agent runs on your phone, home gateway or in the cloud.

> 
> Tim.H.
> 
> [1] https://github.com/google/eddystone <https://github.com/google/eddystone>
> [2] http://blog.verifone.com/apple-ibeacon-paypal-beacon-and-ble-what-does-it-all-mean/ <http://blog.verifone.com/apple-ibeacon-paypal-beacon-and-ble-what-does-it-all-mean/>
> 

—
   Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org <mailto:dsr@w3.org>>