An open standard solution for domotic interoperability

This article describes a service-oriented solution framework designed for home environments. A pragmatic approach is developed to help integrate conventional home automation systems following the service oriented computing paradigm. We believe it is improbable that there will be a single dominant middleware for the home computing that would be right for different appliances. A number of middlewares have recently emerged and it is common knowledge that they haven't a sufficient degree of interoperability. Because of this, the authors show how the approach based on XML, Web Services, and Internet protocols, provide a uniform and novel architecture to cope with the architecture complexity in a open standard way. Furthermore a converging layer is conceived to incorporate a high level abstraction by an XML-based home automation language. © 2006 IEEE