Towards Ambient Business : Value-added Services through an Open Object Information Infrastructure

Internet-based information sharing among different partners of the value chain enables collaborative business. Beyond, applying ambient technologies provides new opportunities for gathering information ubiquitously from various sources including physical objects, e.g. the movement of goods or cars, and virtual objects, i.e. the information trails created through customer interactions. Granting public access to this wealth of ubiquitously gathered information favors an unprecedented climate of innovation fostering the collaborative development of new value-added services by external developers and even customers. We call this Ambient Business. In this context, the paper reveals empirical evidence and an appraisal of the emergent trend towards Ambient Business. Further more we at hand point out how to ensure arbitrary access to information about physical products and virtual objects by introducing the concept of the Open Object Information Infrastructure (OOII). As result new and innovative knowledge intensive products and services will be conceivable by deploying this OOII as a publicly accessible database. 1 From Collaborative Business to Ambient Business The diffusion of Internet technology creates new opportunities for the realization of collaborative business among different partners of the value chain. Among others the development of new forms of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) named Customer Integration can be observed in recent years [Reichwald/Piller 2006]. Customer Integrations aims at bringing customers’ knowledge, ideas, and preferences into the value creation process of a company. Customer Integration may take place at different stages in the value chain that is from R&D up to sales and distribution. For instance, Internet-based configurators facilitate customer to participate in designing and developing of products choosing individual settings out of standard modules. Thereby configurators enable vendors to acquire customer’s preferences directly out of their actions [von Hippel 1998]. One example of these new products is an individualized printed Christian Schmitt, Kai Fischbach, and Detlef Schoder newspaper. When evoking a customized newspaper, one might instantly think of an online version where readers often already nowadays have the opportunity to select only articles which they are particularly interested in. However, reading a printed newspaper is often preferred instead of reading it on the screen. New manufacturing as well as information and communication technologies make it possible that readers (on an individual basis) can choose the topics relevant for them the day before they receive the printed newspaper at their homes. A simple phone-call or a query via the Internet is enough. Being on the road from Electronic Business to Ambient Business, further opportunities for developing new forms of CRM emerge while gathering information directly from customer interactions [Gershman/Fano 2006]. Especially the connection of the real with the virtual world by embedding computers or smallest processors, memory chips and sensors into the environment and into physical objects [Gershenfeld 1999], as well as using natural, multimodal customer interaction [van Dam 2001] influences future business services to a large extend [Fano/Gershman 2002, Mattern 2005, Roussos 2006, Fleisch/Tellkamp 2006]. In particular, the possibility of assigning unique IDs to physical objects by embedding sensors enables customer to identifying real objects. Furthermore, these unique IDs can be used as a primary key to access virtual data objects that provide specific information about the related real object (e.g. product qualities or the current whereabouts). Connecting everyday objects to stored information in this way results in building a so called „Internet of Things” [Gershenfeld et al. 2004, Fleisch/Mattern 2005]. First steps to implement this scenario are ongoing in projects like Semapedia [Rondeau/Wiechers 2005] and commercial standardization initiatives like the EPCGlobal Network [Engels et al. 2001]. The goal of the EPCGlobal network is to provide information related to products while tracking them automatically on their ways through the value chain using small inexpensive RFID-sensors and readers. In addition, the information is stored decentralized and can be shared securely among partners of the value chain applying the Internet and services for discovering significant product details. Nevertheless, the EPCGlobal Network is limited to selective partners of the value chain and does not incorporate prospects of Customer Integration as shown by Amazon.com [Roush 2005a] or Google.com [Roush 2005b]. Hence, in order to enable and benefit from new paradigms like Open Innovation [Chesbrough 2003] we propose the concept of publicly accessible object information. We assert that this consistently open approach favors an unprecedented climate of innovation fostering the collaborative development of new and innovative Ambient Business services by external developers and even end-users. 2 Value-added Services through Publicly Accessible Object Information Thinking of Ambient Business means granting access to information gathered by mobile smart objects and local ambient environments hosted by different service providers. To ensure arbitrary access to corresponding filed object information enabling the 1 For details on the individualized printed newspaper see http://www.medieninnovation.info/. 2 The newly-introduced term Ambient Business refers to a stronger reflection of considerations concerning economics in comparison with the well-established Ubiquitous Computing [Weiser 1991], Pervasive Computing [Hansmann et al. 2003] or Ambient Intelligence [Aarts et al. 2001] that mainly reflect considerations concerning technology (for details on Ambient Business see www.ambient-business.eu). Christian Schmitt, Kai Fischbach, and Detlef Schoder development of Ambient Business services we introduce the framework of the Open Object Information Infrastructure (OOII) in the following (see Fig. 1). Fig. 1: The OOII Framework 2.1 Ubiquitous Information Gathering Connecting the real with the virtual world means embedding of computers or smallest processors, memory chips and sensors into physical objects, named “Smart Objects”. For instance, with the assistance of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) objects can be identified automatically without line of sight by transponders which are attached to them [Finkenzeller 2003]. Other examples are sensor networks: Smallest sensors, which are implemented into the environment, forming ad-hoc networks in order to recognize e.g. the whereabouts, the speed, size and form of objects and to observe them over a period of time [Culler et al. 2004]. In order to develop applications these sensed single data has to be formed into usable incidents and statements by appropriate filter and aggregation procedures. Therefore numerous projects for the development of middleware for ambient environments have already started (see for an overview of seChristian Schmitt, Kai Fischbach, and Detlef Schoder lected projects [Hill et al. 2004, Schoch 2005]). Researchers have developed novel applications e.g. wearable systems with sensors that can continuously monitor the user's vital signs, motor activity, social interactions, sleep patterns, and other health indicators activation throughout the entire day resulting in a truly personal medical record [Pentland 2004]. Most applications, however, ignore the further use of information in another context as the one it was gathered. Hence we propose to extend existing middleware technologies with mechanisms for the semantic markup of the sensor data as described in the following. 2.2 Semantically Enriched Object Information Thinking about mobile smart objects and local ambient environments hosted by different service providers, a common understanding of the semantics of the information gathered in someone‘s context is essential to their recombination in new business contexts. Corresponding the way companies exchange businesses messages and conduct trading relationships in common terms (e.g. using ebXML) sensor data or even corresponding events have to be enriched by semantic annotations. Therefore Semantic Web [Berners-Lee et al. 2001] standards like Topic Maps [Pepper/Moore 2001, Garshol/Moore 2005, Durusau et al. 2006] or RDF(S)/OWL [Brickley/Guha 2004, McGuinness/van Harmelen 2004] can be employed. Furthermore it has to be taken into account that sensor data should be integrated with additional available semantically enriched information from external resources to develop innovative Ambient Business services. By now a number of semantic web services [Fensel 2002, Alesso/Smith 2004] and “Smart Agents” [Lee 2005, Konnerth et al. 2006] are developing that could be adapted to integrate semantically annotated resources to so-called object information. For instance customer feedback about a bought product can be obtained by Semantic Blogging [Cayzer 2004] in order to enhance CRM. 2.3 Publicly Accessible Object Information In order to build ambient services the gathered object information must be accessible even if no continuous connection can be ensured for smart objects due to their mobility. In addition both the great amount of smart objects and the existing energy and capacity limitations of the embedded computers and sensors have to be taken into account. These prerequisites suggest the implementation of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks to save accompanying virtual data objects and to process information on additional network nodes, which have sufficient memory capacity and computer power. P2P networks offer a better scalability, a self-organized and decentralized coordination of unused or limited resources, a higher fault tolerance as well as a better support of spontaneous networking of entities in comparison with the alternative client/server architecture [Barkai 2001, O