Realizing an Open Ubiquitous Environment in a RESTful Way

Web services have been widely used to support context-aware applications for context information retrieval in a ubiquitous environment. However, most of the existing research efforts in this field only focus on using SOAP web service as an enabling technology. In this paper, we compare REST and SOAP web services for supporting ubiquitous environments. We describe our approaches to deploy an open ubiquitous computing environment using REST style services along with semantic web and mobile technologies. We also discuss an example context-aware application developed for the environment and show how REST style services can contribute in moving ubiquitous computing technologies into the real world.