Facilitating the Design of Multi-channel Interfaces for Ambient Computing

The use of mobile and hand-held devices is a desirable option for implementation of user interaction with remote services from a distance, whereby the user should be able to select the input device depending on personal preferences, capabilities and availability of interaction devices. Because of the heterogeneity of available devices and interaction styles, the interoperability needs particular attention by the developer. This paper describes the design of a general solution to enable mobile devices to have control on services at remote hosts. The applied approach enhances the idea of separating the user interface from the application logic, leading to the definition of virtual or logical input devices physically separated from the controlled services.

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Interoperable Semantic and Syntactic Service Discovery for Ambient Computing Environments

Innovative Applications of Ambient Intelligence ◽

10.4018/978-1-4666-0038-6.ch017 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 213-232 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Sonia Ben Mokhtar ◽

Pierre-Guillaume Raverdy ◽

Aitor Urbieta ◽

Roberto Speicys Cardoso

Keyword(s):

Service Discovery ◽

Description Language ◽

Semantic Approach ◽

Service Oriented Architectures ◽

Prototype Implementation ◽

Service Oriented ◽

Computing Environments ◽

Efficient Matching ◽

Ambient Computing ◽

Resource Constrained Devices

The inherent heterogeneity of ambient computing environments and their constant evolution requires middleware platforms to manage networked components designed, developed, and deployed independently. Such management must also be efficient to cater for resource-constrained devices and highly dynamic situations due to the spontaneous appearance and disappearance of networked resources. For service discovery protocols (SDP), one of the main functions of service-oriented architectures (SOA), the efficiency of the matching of syntactic service descriptions is most often opposed to the fullness of the semantic approach. As part of the PLASTIC middleware, the authors present an interoperable discovery platform that features an efficient matching and ranking algorithm able to process service descriptions and discovery requests from both semantic and syntactic SDPs. To that end, the paper defines a generic, modular description language able to record service functional properties, potentially extended with semantic annotations. The proposed discovery platform leverages the advanced communication capabilities provided by the PLASTIC middleware to discover services in multi-network environments. An evaluation of the prototype implementation demonstrates that multi-protocols service matching supporting various levels of expressiveness can be achieved in ambient computing environments.

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