An Ontology Based Approach Towards A Universal Description Framework for Home Networks

Current home networks typically involve two or more machines sharing network resources. The vision for the home network has grown from a simple computer network, to every day appliances embedded with network capabilities. In this environment devices and services within the home can interoperate, regardless of protocol or platform. Network clients can discover required resources by performing network discovery over component descriptions. Common approaches to this discovery process involve simple matching of keywords or attribute/value pairings. Interest emerging from the Semantic Web community has led to ontology languages being applied to network domains, providing a logical and semantically rich approach to both describing and discovering network components. In much of the existing work within this domain, developers have focused on defining new description frameworks in isolation from existing protocol frameworks and vocabularies. This work proposes an ontology-based description framework which takes the ontology approach to the next step, where existing description frameworks are in- corporated into the ontology-based framework, allowing discovery mechanisms to cover multiple existing domains. In this manner, existing protocols and networking approaches can participate in semantically-rich discovery processes. This framework also includes a system architecture developed for the purpose of reconciling existing home network solutions with the ontology-based discovery process. This work also describes an implementation of the approach and is deployed within a home-network environment. This implementation involves existing home networking frameworks, protocols and components, allowing the claims of this work to be examined and evaluated from a ‘real-world’ perspective

THE COMPONENTS OF ONLINE EDUCATION: HIGHER EDUCATION ON THE INTERNET

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Model-driven and Compositional Service Creation in the Internet of Services

Doktorgradsavhandling i informasjons- og kommunikasjonsteknologi, Universitetet i Agder, Grimstad, 2012In the Future Internet, billions of devices will be connected to the Internet. Devices at any levels of hierarchy provide software functionality that can be used by others. We can call the device’s functionality a service, which in turn, introduces the concept of the Internet of Services. From the software developer perspectives, a new service can be created by utilizing services in the Internet of Services. An important issue of the creation of such service-based application is regarding their deployment method on personalized and embedded devices. For each device with different capability and configuration, different tailored code is required. For this, a flexible method and tools that support an automatic code generation for a device with a specific capability and configuration are mandatory. This thesis proposes PMG-pro (Present, Model, Generate and provide), a language- independent, bottom-up and model-driven method for the service creation in the Internet of Services. With this method, a service is created by providing the new functionality of a service-based application as a service. By using existing service frameworks and APIs, from a service description, PMG-pro generates an abstract graphical service representation (service model) and source code implementing for service invocations. Depending on the target modeling languages, different graphical notations can be used to represent services. Similarly, different programming languages can also be used to implement the service invocations. We call these pairs (i.e., the service model and the source code) platform-specific models. With these platform models, service composers use the graphical service representation to model new service-based applications, while the machine (i.e., computer system) uses the source code to generate code from the service-based application model. This thesis contributes to the service engineering method that applies a modeldriven development approach. Three main contributions are a model-driven method for service creation, an automatic service presentation of pre-made services, and a new method of handling device capability and configuration. With these, service creation in the Internet of Services can be done in a rapid and automatic manner. Service designers can create a new service by defining a model of service-based applications using pre-made service models, while code for a specific device can be generated automatically from the model. The PMG-pro method has been partly prototyped and validated on various case studies in the domain of smart homes that have produced encouraging results. The method promotes a rapid, language-independent, and unified process of software service development

Ubiquitous Computing

The aim of this book is to give a treatment of the actively developed domain of Ubiquitous computing. Originally proposed by Mark D. Weiser, the concept of Ubiquitous computing enables a real-time global sensing, context-aware informational retrieval, multi-modal interaction with the user and enhanced visualization capabilities. In effect, Ubiquitous computing environments give extremely new and futuristic abilities to look at and interact with our habitat at any time and from anywhere. In that domain, researchers are confronted with many foundational, technological and engineering issues which were not known before. Detailed cross-disciplinary coverage of these issues is really needed today for further progress and widening of application range. This book collects twelve original works of researchers from eleven countries, which are clustered into four sections: Foundations, Security and Privacy, Integration and Middleware, Practical Applications

Model-driven and Compositional Service Creation in the Internet of Services

Doktorgradsavhandling i informasjons- og kommunikasjonsteknologi, Universitetet i Agder, Grimstad, 2012In the Future Internet, billions of devices will be connected to the Internet. Devices at any levels of hierarchy provide software functionality that can be used by others. We can call the device’s functionality a service, which in turn, introduces the concept of the Internet of Services. From the software developer perspectives, a new service can be created by utilizing services in the Internet of Services. An important issue of the creation of such service-based application is regarding their deployment method on personalized and embedded devices. For each device with different capability and configuration, different tailored code is required. For this, a flexible method and tools that support an automatic code generation for a device with a specific capability and configuration are mandatory. This thesis proposes PMG-pro (Present, Model, Generate and provide), a language- independent, bottom-up and model-driven method for the service creation in the Internet of Services. With this method, a service is created by providing the new functionality of a service-based application as a service. By using existing service frameworks and APIs, from a service description, PMG-pro generates an abstract graphical service representation (service model) and source code implementing for service invocations. Depending on the target modeling languages, different graphical notations can be used to represent services. Similarly, different programming languages can also be used to implement the service invocations. We call these pairs (i.e., the service model and the source code) platform-specific models. With these platform models, service composers use the graphical service representation to model new service-based applications, while the machine (i.e., computer system) uses the source code to generate code from the service-based application model. This thesis contributes to the service engineering method that applies a modeldriven development approach. Three main contributions are a model-driven method for service creation, an automatic service presentation of pre-made services, and a new method of handling device capability and configuration. With these, service creation in the Internet of Services can be done in a rapid and automatic manner. Service designers can create a new service by defining a model of service-based applications using pre-made service models, while code for a specific device can be generated automatically from the model. The PMG-pro method has been partly prototyped and validated on various case studies in the domain of smart homes that have produced encouraging results. The method promotes a rapid, language-independent, and unified process of software service development

Features Interaction Detection and Resolution in Smart home systems Using Agent-Based Negotiation Approach

Smart home systems (SHS) have become an increasingly important technology in modern life. Apart from safety, security, convenience and entertainment, they offer significant potential benefits for the elderly, disabled and others who cannot live independently. Furthermore, smart homes are environmentally friendly. SHS functionality is based on perceiving residents’ needs and desires, then offering services accordingly. In order to be smart, homes have to be equipped with sensors, actuators and intelligent devices and appliances, as well as connectivity and control mechanisms. A typical SHS comprises heterogeneous services and appliances that are designed by many different developers and which may meet for the first time in the home network. The heterogeneous nature of the systems, in addition to the dynamic environment in which they are deployed, exposes them to undesirable interactions between services, known as Feature Interaction (FI). Another reason for FI is the divergence between the policies, needs and desires of different residents. Proposed approaches to FI detection and resolution should take these different types of interaction into account. Negotiation is an effective mechanism to address FI, as conflicting features can then negotiate with each other to reach a compromise agreement. The ultimate goal of this study is to develop an Agent-Based Negotiation Approach (ABNA) to detect and resolve feature interaction in a SHS. A smart home architecture incorporating the components of the ABNA has been proposed. The backbone of the proposed approach is a hierarchy in which features are organised according to their importance in terms of their functional contribution to the overall service. Thus, features are categorised according to their priority, those which are essential for the service to function having the highest priority. An agent model of the ABNA is proposed and comprehensive definitions of its components are presented. A computational model of the system also has been proposed which is used to explain the behaviour of different components when a proposal to perform a task is raised. To clarify the system requirements and also to aid the design and implementation of its properties, a formal specification of the ABNA is presented using the mathematical notations of Calculus of Context-aware Ambient (CCA), then in order to evaluate the approach a case study is reported, involving two services within the SHS: ventilation and air conditioning. For the purpose of evaluation, the execution environment of CCA is utilised to execute and analyse the ABNA

A self-configuring resolver architecture for resource discovery and routing in device networks

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (p. 99-104).by William Adjie-Winoto.S.M

The Continuum Architecture: Towards Enabling Chaotic Ubiquitous Computing

Interactions in the style of the ubiquitous computing paradigm are possible today, but only in handcrafted environments within one administrative and technological realm. This thesis describes an architecture (called Continuum), a design that realises the architecture, and a proof-of-concept implementation that brings ubiquitous computing to chaotic environments. Essentially, Continuum enables an ecology at the edge of the network, between users, competing service providers from overlapping administrative domains, competing internet service providers, content providers, and software developers that want to add value to the user experience. Continuum makes the ubiquitous computing functionality orthogonal to other application logic. Existing web applications are augmented for ubiquitous computing with functionality that is dynamically compiled and injected by a middleware proxy into the web pages requested by a web browser at the user?s mobile device. This enables adaptability to environment variability, manageability without user involvement, and expansibility without changes to the mobile. The middleware manipulates self-contained software units with precise functionality (called frames), which help the user interact with contextual services in conjunction with the data to which they are attached. The middleware and frame design explicitly incorporates the possibility of discrepancies between the assumptions of ubiquitous-computing software developers and field realities: multiple administrative domains, unavailable service, unavailable software, and missing contextual information. A framework for discovery and authorisation addresses the chaos inherent to the paradigm through the notion of role assertions acquired dynamically by the user. Each assertion represents service access credentials and contains bootstrapping points for service discovery on behalf of the holding user. A proof-of-concept prototype validates the design, and implements several frames that demonstrate general functionality, including driving discovery queries over multiple service discovery protocols and making equivalences between service types, across discovery protocols

D7.5 FIRST consolidated project results

The FIRST project commenced in January 2017 and concluded in December 2022, including a 24-month suspension period due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the project, we successfully delivered seven technical reports, conducted three workshops on Key Enabling Technologies for Digital Factories in conjunction with CAiSE (in 2019, 2020, and 2022), produced a number of PhD theses, and published over 56 papers (and numbers of summitted journal papers). The purpose of this deliverable is to provide an updated account of the findings from our previous deliverables and publications. It involves compiling the original deliverables with necessary revisions to accurately reflect the final scientific outcomes of the project