Modeling Interactive Smart Spaces

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables the creation of Interactive Smart Spaces (ISSs) where different types of digital devices are integrated in the ambient or embedded in physical objects, and can sense human actions to control equipment, modify environmental parameters, or create multi-sensory effects. These IoT-enhanced interactive systems can support human activities in different contexts, e.g., education, entertainment, home assistance, rehabilitation, to name a few. This paper explores a human-centered perspective in the design of ISSs, which takes into account some salient characteristics of these systems and introduces new conceptual modeling issues going beyond representing hardware, software, and connectivity features of IoT devices. Interaction in particular emerges as a crucial modeling dimension, needed to capture the interplay occurring not only among multiple connected IoT devices but also among the users and the materials or the spaces embedding such devices. The paper presents a novel conceptual model for Interactive Smart Spaces and exemplifies the identified abstractions through a case study, modelling a complex ISS for children' play and learning that has been installed at two local schools and two therapeutic centers in our country

A participative end-user modeling approach for business process requirements

International audienceA business process can be characterized by multiple perspectives (intentional, organizational, operational, functional, interactional, informational, etc.). Business process modeling must allow different stakeholders to analyze and represent process models according to these different perspectives. This representation is traditionally built using classical data acquisition methods to-gether with a process representation language such as BPMN or UML. These techniques and specialized languages can easily become hard, complex and time consuming. In this paper we propose ISEA, a participative end-user mod-eling approach that allows the stakeholders in a business process to collaborate together in a simple way to communicate the business process requirements in an accurate and understandable manner. Our approach covers the organizational perspective of business processes, exploits the information compiled during the simulation of the processes in the organizational perspective and touches lightly an interactional perspective allowing users to create customized interface sketches to test the user interface navigability and the coherence within the pro-cesses. Thus, ISEA can be seen as a participative end-user modeling approach for business process requirements