Object circles: modeling physical objects as social relationships

Abstract

Physical products, things, and appliances will be associated with digital counterparts, such as additional product information, instructions, API's, etc.. Thus, it will become challenging for users to consciously manage access rights of data of their objects and stay aware of which data is visible to whom. This paper proposes to transfer the notion of Google's circles for managing social relationships to managing data streams of physical objects. We describe the concept and its implementation, and provide a proof-of-concept by a sample scenario. Thus, we show that object circles offer a more intuitive way for everyday users to manage the data-streams of their objects transparently.