International audienceThe Web of Things (WoT) extends the Internet of Things considering that each physical object can be accessed and controlled using Web-based languages and protocols. In this paper, we summarize ongoing work promoting the concept of avatar as a new virtual abstraction to extend physical objects on the Web. An avatar is an extensible and distributed runtime environment endowed with an autonomous behaviour. Avatars rely on Web languages, protocols and reason about semantic annotations to dynamically drive connected objects, exploit their capabilities and expose user-understandable functionalities as Web services. Avatars are also able to collaborate together in order to achieve complex tasks

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In this article, we propose an evolution of trust-based recommender systems that only relies on local information and can be deployed on top of existing social networks. Our approach takes into account friends' similarity and confidence on ratings, but limits data exchange to direct friends, in order to prevent ratings from being globally known. Therefore, calculations are limited to locally processed algorithms, privacy concerns can be taken into account and algorithms are suitable for decentralized or peer-to-peer architectures.We have implemented and evaluated our approach against five others, using the Epinions trust network. We show that local information with good default scoring strategies are sufficient to cover more users than classical collaborative filtering and trust-based recommender systems. Regarding accuracy, our approach performs better than most others, specially for cold start users, despite using less information.