Requirements for an ubiquitous computing infrastructure
Ubiquitous computing is an emerging paradigm for interactions between people and computers. Its aim is to break away from the desktop computing to provide computational services to a user when and where required. In this paper we present the design criteria for an infrastructure platform for ubiquit...
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Maffioletti, S. 2015-05-19T09:10:21Z 2015-05-19T09:10:21Z 2001 Requirements for an ubiquitous computing infrastructure / S. Maffioletti // Культура народов Причерноморья. — 2001. — № 23. — С. 35-40. — Бібліогр.: 9 назв. — англ. 1562-0808 https://nasplib.isofts.kiev.ua/handle/123456789/81684 Ubiquitous computing is an emerging paradigm for interactions between people and computers. Its aim is to break away from the desktop computing to provide computational services to a user when and where required. In this paper we present the design criteria for an infrastructure platform for ubiquitous computing applications. The motivation for building such infrastructure is to formalize a common design methodology for developing application based on the notion of Interactive Environment. Вездесущие компьютерные технологии это образец взаимодействия между людьми и компьютерами. Их цель дать возможность пользоваться услугами компьютерных систем там, где этого пожелает пользователь. В статье представлены принципы разработки основы инфраструктуры для применения вездесущих компьютерных технологий. Причиной создания подобной инфраструктуры является формализация общей методологии разработки прикладных программ, основанных на представлении об интерактивной среде. Всюдисущі комп'ютерні технології це зразок взаємодії між людьми і комп'ютерами. Їх мета дати можливість користуватися послугами комп'ютерних систем там, де цього побажає користувач. У статті представлені принципи розробки основи інфраструктури для застосування всюдисущих комп'ютерних технологій. Причиною створення подібної інфраструктури є формалізація загальної методології розробки прикладних програм, заснованих на уявленні про інтерактивну середу. en Кримський науковий центр НАН України і МОН України Культура народов Причерноморья Междисциплинарные исследования языковой коммуникации Requirements for an ubiquitous computing infrastructure Article published earlier |
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Requirements for an ubiquitous computing infrastructure Maffioletti, S. Междисциплинарные исследования языковой коммуникации |
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Requirements for an ubiquitous computing infrastructure |
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Requirements for an ubiquitous computing infrastructure |
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Requirements for an ubiquitous computing infrastructure |
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Requirements for an ubiquitous computing infrastructure |
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requirements for an ubiquitous computing infrastructure |
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Maffioletti, S. |
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Междисциплинарные исследования языковой коммуникации |
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Междисциплинарные исследования языковой коммуникации |
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Кримський науковий центр НАН України і МОН України |
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Ubiquitous computing is an emerging paradigm for interactions between people and computers. Its aim is to break away from the desktop computing to provide computational services to a user when and where required. In this paper we present the design criteria for an infrastructure platform for ubiquitous computing applications. The motivation for building such infrastructure is to formalize a common design methodology for developing application based on the notion of Interactive Environment.
Вездесущие компьютерные технологии это образец взаимодействия между людьми и компьютерами. Их цель дать возможность пользоваться услугами компьютерных систем там, где этого пожелает пользователь. В статье представлены принципы разработки основы инфраструктуры для применения вездесущих компьютерных технологий. Причиной создания подобной инфраструктуры является формализация общей методологии разработки прикладных программ, основанных на представлении об интерактивной среде.
Всюдисущі комп'ютерні технології це зразок взаємодії між людьми і комп'ютерами. Їх мета дати можливість користуватися послугами комп'ютерних систем там, де цього побажає користувач. У статті представлені принципи розробки основи інфраструктури для застосування всюдисущих комп'ютерних технологій. Причиною створення подібної інфраструктури є формалізація загальної методології розробки прикладних програм, заснованих на уявленні про інтерактивну середу.
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1562-0808 |
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https://nasplib.isofts.kiev.ua/handle/123456789/81684 |
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Requirements for an ubiquitous computing infrastructure / S. Maffioletti // Культура народов Причерноморья. — 2001. — № 23. — С. 35-40. — Бібліогр.: 9 назв. — англ. |
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Раздел 1. Междисциплинарные исследования языковой коммуникации 35
Requirements for an ubiquitous computing infrastructure
Sergio Maffioletti
Department of Informatique, Fribourg University
Email: Sergio.Maffioletti@unifr.ch
Сержио Маффиоллети – аспирант кафедры информатики университета в Фри-
бурге (Швейцария). Родился 11 сентября 1971 года в г.Бергамо (Италия). Закон-
чил факультет информатики Миланского университета в 1998 году, дипломная
работа посвящена интеллектуальным агентам. Участвовал в научно-
исследовательском проекте Европейского Союза Larflast (Learning Foreign Lan-
guage Scientific Terminology). Организатор студенческой лаборатории по парал-
лельным процессам и искусственному интеллекту. Разработал курс «Язык про-
граммирования Java для Интернет-приложений» для учителей средних школ.
Сфера научных интересов: архитектура программного обеспечения, информаци-
онные агенты, Интернет и другие гетерогенные информационные системы.
Вездесущие компьютерные технологии это образец взаимодействия между людьми и ком-
пьютерами. Их цель дать возможность пользоваться услугами компьютерных систем там, где это-
го пожелает пользователь. В статье представлены принципы разработки основы инфраструктуры
для применения вездесущих компьютерных технологий. Причиной создания подобной инфра-
структуры является формализация общей методологии разработки прикладных программ, осно-
ванных на представлении об интерактивной среде.
Всюдисущі комп'ютерні технології це зразок взаємодії між людьми і комп'ютерами. Їх мета
дати можливість користуватися послугами комп'ютерних систем там, де цього побажає користу-
вач. У статті представлені принципи розробки основи інфраструктури для застосування всюди-
сущих комп'ютерних технологій. Причиною створення подібної інфраструктури є формалізація
загальної методології розробки прикладних програм, заснованих на уявленні про інтерактивну
середу.
Ubiquitous computing is an emerging paradigm for interactions between people and computers. Its aim
is to break away from the desktop computing to provide computational services to a user when and where re-
quired. In this paper we present the design criteria for an infrastructure platform for ubiquitous computing appli-
cations. The motivation for building such infrastructure is to formalize a common design methodology for de-
veloping application based on the notion of Interactive Environment.
1. Introduction
The way people used to think about computers and, as consequence, the way they interact with them, is
always determined by the constrains the technology impose.
The more the technology availability and reliability can be taken for granted, the more the users change
the nature of their requirements. In the early days of computation, where the technology support was rather
rough and unreliable, users expectations were technology-driven. More performances and more reliable hard-
ware was the customer’s entire requirement. Nowadays technology is entering in its “mature phase” [5]. This
means we can start taking technology for granted, and customers tend to change their expectations focusing on
their everyday requirements, like the freedom to move around, the freedom to chose the medium used to attend
the services offered by this technology.
mailto:Sergio.Maffioletti@unifr.ch
36 Sergio Maffioletti. Requirements for an ubiquitous computing infrastructure
The continuous changing of the relation between the technology and the users alter the role of technolo-
gy in our lives.
In the past fifty years of computation there have been two great trends in this relationship: the mainframe
and the PC relationship.
Today Internet is carrying us through an era of widespread distributed computing toward the relationship
of ubiquitous computing [9] characterized by deeply imbedding computation in the world. The vision of ubiqui-
tous computing, first expressed by Weiser [8], is to break away from the desktop computing to provide computa-
tional services to a user when and where required.
The ubiquitous computing era will have lots of computers sharing each of us. Some of these computers
will be embedded in walls, chairs, clothing, light switches, cars. They will operate in the background of our life,
in a transparent and not intrusive way. This vision will change not only the way we'll interface with computers
but, also, the class of applications deployed for this scenario.
Actually applications deeply rely on computer’s structure: desktop applications are conceived to be exe-
cuted by a PC with a standard input system like keyboard or mouse and a rather simple output system like a
monitor; distributed applications rely on a presence of more computers networked together. None of them have
users as a central notion of their model.
Developing applications for UbiComp scenario means to deal with completely different constrains and
functionalities determined by the user expectations, like the availability of services wherever, whenever and in
any for the user require.
This is a rather important shift in HCI domain: applications integrated in our reality and realized by the
interaction between one or more computing devices. We'll be able to use devices of different forms and func-
tionality’s; we'll interact with them in a more natural way (speech, vision, movement, facial expressions...).
The motivation for building these systems is to bring computation into the real, physical world to sup-
port what is traditionally considered non-computational activity; to allow computer to participate in activities
that have never previously involved computation and to allow people to interact with computational system the
way they interact with other people: via gesture, voice, movement, and context.
The main challenge for the success of these systems is the design of smart user interfaces and software
that allows for ubiquitous and easy access to personal information and that is flexible enough to handle changes
in user context and availability of resources; in one word an infrastructure. In this paper we present the basic re-
quirements for an UbiComp infrastructure focused on defining new models for the development of interactive
environment applications.
2. Ubiquitous computing system
Ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) denoted the universal availability of computation throughout multiple
systems in the user's environment.
A ubiquitous computing system consists of a heterogeneous set of computing devices; a set of supported
tasks; and some infrastructures the devices may rely on in order to carry out their tasks. Differently form desktop
systems, the emphasis is on combining software components to provide services to the user. With an UbiComp
system we are concerned not only with software services but also with devices and how to combine them.
Analyzing an UbiComp system we're interested in classify the main functionalities it supplies differently
from the standard desktop systems. Weiser's [8] classification of an UbiComp system is based on two fundamen-
tal attributes:
Ubiquity: interaction with the system is available wherever the user needs it.
Transparency: the system is non-intrusive and is integrated into the everyday environment.
According with this classification Abowd [6] identified two dimensions that provide a rather clear
boundary for UbiComp systems and express the relationship with other emerging research areas:
User mobility: reflect the freedom the user has to move about when interacting with the system.
Interface transparency: applies to the system's interface and reflects the conscious effort
Раздел 1. Междисциплинарные исследования языковой коммуникации 37
end attention the system requires of the user, either for operating it or for perceiving its output.
UbiComp
mobile
computing
adaptive
interface
desktop
computing
wearable
computing
augmented
reality
smart
environment
Figure 1
present an ontological framework based on the two dimensions defined above. This framework allows character-
izing other research streams relevant to HCI and ubiquitous computing. As we may see UbiComp system tries to
maximize the user mobility and the interface transparency. In contrast desktop computing offer no user mobility
and, for the most part, no transparency to the end user.
3. Interactive environment
Research in ubiquitous computing is toward the development of application environment able to deal
with the mobility of both users and computing devices. The vision of ubiquitous computing relies on the pres-
ence of environments enriched by computers embedded in everyday objects (blackboards, table, chairs...) and by
sensors able to catch information form the context.
It is then an important requirement for UbiComp applications to provide a support environment in which
specialized computing instruments
1
can be accommodated and integrated into existing application contexts.
Our interest is in Interactive Environments, defined as “Intelligent Environments”[3] or “Cooperatives
Buildings”[7], conceived primary for workgroup interaction. These environments represent the spatial bounda-
ries of applications integrated in our everyday context; they represent the physical space where the applications
are placed and executed.
Applications developed for these environments have two dimensions: a service dimension that represents
the number of services available in the system and a device dimension that represents the number of devices in-
corporated in the environment.
Interactive environments have specific computational properties that generally distinguish them from
other computational systems. They have a large number of hardware and software components that need to co-
operate; they tend to be highly dynamic and require reconfiguration and resource management on the fly as their
components and inhabitants change and as they adjust their operation to suit the learned presence of their user.
Even though each interactive environment is created in its own way for its own purpose, they are gener-
ally built out of similar components.
Intelligent Environments defined in the Metaglue [3] project are an example. Intelligent Environments
contain a multitude of subsystems comprising their perceptual interfaces, software applications, hardware device
connections, and mechanisms for internal control.
1 With ``computing instrument'' we refer to both devices and sensors. It identifies the abstract idea of computers integrated in our every-
day environment
38 Sergio Maffioletti. Requirements for an ubiquitous computing infrastructure
Figure 2 shows an example of an interactive environment. The application context represent the logical
area where the application takes place and corresponds to one of the physical regions composing the interactive
environment (these regions may vary in dimension from a single room to an entire building). A federation of
computing instruments is a set of authenticated instruments cooperating with each other. The federation repre-
sents the group of instruments belonging each time to a specific application context.
The application will use the federation’s topology in order to determine the service-device association.
Hence an application is realized by the cooperation between services associated to different devices belonging to
the same application context.
4. Common middleware
The few existing integrated multi-device computer environments today tend to be highly specialized and
based on application-specific software.
Applications developed for interactive environments should be able to interconnect and manage large
numbers of disparate hardware and software components. They should operate in real-time; dynamically add and
remove components to a running system without interrupting its operation; control allocation of resources; and
provide a means to capture persistent state information. Frequently these components are not designed to coop-
erate, so not only they must be connected, but also there is a need to express the “logic” of this interconnection.
In other words, inter-component connections are not merely protocols, but also contain the explicit knowledge of
how to use these protocols. Thus, viewing the connections simply as an application programming interface is
insufficient. Cooperation among different applications is also difficult to achieve without a common platform. In
order to model applications in this domain we need to define a common design methodology based on new para-
digms independents from the technology. We are investigating a model to abstract the main components of an
UbiComp system in order to formalize the development of interactive environment applications. These compo-
nents may be classified into three abstraction layers:
Physical deals with technological constrains.
Middleware defines structure and the cooperation of abstract services.
Application concerns the user interfaces.
Thank to these abstractions a middleware will present a uniform access abstraction for different ubiqui-
tous devices, allowing them to interact and cooperate. This allows us to write applications scaling both on ser-
vices offered and on devices composing the system. The model is not intended to be used for a single applica-
tion, but to provide a standardized view of basic interactive environment functionality.
Functionalities
Figure 2: an interactive environment
Раздел 1. Междисциплинарные исследования языковой коммуникации 39
The main requirements that arise from the idea of a common middleware are:
Mobility: First of all, the middleware has to deal with the mobility of the users and other physical ob-
jects. Therefore it must support mobile wireless communication and small mobile computing devices, such as
PDAs and laptops.
Heterogeneity: Like in the Nexus [1] project, a common middleware has to accommodate a large varie-
ty of application environments, ranging from areas covering whole nation to areas just covering an office. This
leads to a very heterogeneous system, which has to support different network technologies and different track-
ing systems for example. Further aspects of heterogeneity come from the different services that rely on the
presence of this middleware and the various input and output devices that have to be supported.
Scalability: The middleware has to scale well for both a large number of cooperating services, which
realize the application in each application context, and a large number of devices involved each time the appli-
cation is used. Services represent the logical dimension of the application, while devices represent its physical
dimension.
Existing projects like Oxygen [2], Nexus [1], Beach [7] and Metaglue [3] address the functionalities
stated above as well but do not consider higher level service classification. Applications in these projects cannot
rely on a suitable abstraction layer describing their functionalities.
What we need, instead, is to allow applications to define their own ontology for classifying resources
they may offer and require. These high level concepts will be associated to low-level service implementation by
the base infrastructure according with the constrains defined in each application context. This allows both the
application and the instruments to use a high-level service description for interaction.
In such a way each computing instrument is also able to roam from one application context to another
(even if the other is using another ontology) without changing its service description.
5. Conclusions
In this paper we have presented the general idea of a middleware that provides the basic functionality's
for modeling interactive environment applications. This middleware will allow such applications to be created
much more easily as they can rely on a common infrastructure. The platform maintains specific models for cer-
tain areas of the real world, which allow a user to access information, or services by their spatial position or
through real world objects. A middleware for UbiComp applications aim at answering the need to provide a uni-
fied vision of the different computing functionality's issuing from convergence between information and com-
munication technologies.
6. Reference
1. Fritz, Hohl and Uwe Kubach and Alexander Leonhardi and Kurt Rothermel. Next Century Challenges: Nex-
us – An Open Global Infrastructure for Spacial Aware Applications. ACM, 1999.
2. Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. MIT project Oxygen.
www.oxygen.les.mit.edu/, June 2000.
3. Michael H. Coen and Brenton A. Philips and Nimrod Warshawsky and Luke Weisman and Stephen Peters
and Peter Finin. Meeting the Computational Needs for Intelligent Environment: The Metaglue System. Submit-
ted to MANSE99, 1999.
4. Elizabeth D. Mynatt. Everyday Computing. GVU Center and College of Computing, Georgia Tech. March
1999.
5. Donald A. Norman. The Invisible Computer. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, 1999.
6. D. Salber and A. K. Dey and G. D. Abowd. Ubiquitous Computing: Defining an HCI Research Agenda for
an Emerging Interaction Par adigm. GVU Center and College of Computing, Georgia Tech. 1999.
7. Norbert A. Streitz and Jorg Geissler and Torsten Holmenr. Roomware for cooperative buildings: Integrated
Design of Architectural Spaces and Information Spaces. In N. A. Streitz, S. Konomi, H. J. Burkhardt, editor,
LNCS 1370, Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Cooperative Buildings, pages 4-21, Darmstadt,
February 1998.
40 Sergio Maffioletti. Requirements for an ubiquitous computing infrastructure
8. M. Weiser. Some Computer Science Issue in Ubiquitous Computing. Communications on the ACM, 36(7):
75-84, July 1993.
9. M. Weiser and J. S. Brown. Design Calm Technology. PowerGrid Journal, July 1996.
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