A Conference Workshop of Ubicomp 2007, September 16, 2007, Innsbruck - Austria - Europe
Probably one of the most interesting research areas in Pervasive Computing
and Ubiquitous Computing are applications that are orchestrated by a variety
of different components. Here the cooperation and interplay of distributed
and dynamic devices and applications are defining the overall system behaviour.
Prominent examples are smart environments resp. applications that realize assisted
living ambience, where people are assisted unobtrusively in their daily
environment by the cooperation of a variety of different devices and applications.
Examples are the Aware Home project of the Georgia Institute
of Technology, the results (e.g. Intelligent Room) of the Oxygen-initiative of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the prototype implementations of
the SmartKom and EMBASSI projects, or the results of the EU-funded project
Amigo and the recently started EU-funded project PERSONA.
Many implementations have an architecture of distributed devices and applications in common
whereas the component interrelationship and underlying orchestration principles
seem to differ. Analyzing this, different blueprints of functional architectures exist
in parallel and it seems very difficult to identify consolidated approaches for
the definition of needed components, their internal functions, their interrelationships
and their diversified co-operations as well as their basic communication
principles. Also reliable mechanisms that allow the comparison of different approaches
are not well known.
The workshop seeks to discuss different system
architectures for pervasive and ubiquitous computing from a top down approach
and to discuss their implications on the selection of the applied functional components
as well as their interrelationships. Furthermore the involvement of the
user within distributed environments and its consideration while defining the
functional architecture should be discussed. For this the workshop is interested
in seeing how especially the users’ needs can be mapped directly on choices of
the system architecture design and the necessary technology constrains. Here it
should be discussed, how the user can be directly involved in static (means before
deployment) or dynamic (means upon execution) configuration of the system.
Since Ubiquitous Computing systems are meant to be user-centric this quality
should be concerned while designing the overall system or by supporting user
intervention with mechanisms of end-user programming. The workshop will elaborate
a reliable feature list of component architectures as well as a feature list
of components’ co-operation characteristics with respect to application areas.
