e-Smart, day 1. I arrived late, just in tiome for the talk by Gemalto’s Patrick George about Web applications for smart devices (he was replacing Jean-Jacques Vandewalle) [Van06].
Patrick gave an account of many previous attempts to link the Web and smart card, which we all know did not work so far: as of today, we just don’t use smart cards in connection with the Web.
Things are changing today, for at least two reasons: first, smart cards are changing, as they become better connected, and they start including enough memory to host more applications. Then, the Web is changing. The Web 2.0 adds new aspects, which can be summarized as rich, social, mashup, and mobile.
- The card has always been mobile. The previous attempts to use cards on the Web were local and private servers, for instance having your Google calendar on your SIM.
- The main proposal in the talk was to use mashups to integrate private data coming from the smart card with public data coming from the Web. This looks like a very good idea. If we extend the Google Calendar example, we could integrate private agenda items with public ones, without having to trust Google for storing our confidential appointments. And I am sure that there are many more practical and interesting ideas.
The talk did not mention how card could be used for the “rich” part and the “social” part, but I am quite confident that smart cards could be useful for the social part, just because they provide a nice way to split private and public information (not to mention their possible use in authentication or other security-related stuff).
Overall, a nice, refreshing talk that tickles your brain.
ADDED (22/09): This paper is one of the 2 winners of this year’s Isabelle Attali award for most innovative contribution.
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