In April 2009 the book “Context-Aware Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing for Enhanced Usability: Adaptive Technologies and Applications” will be published including a chapter of our team that is entitled “Employing Context Information and Semantics to Advance the Responsiveness of Service Compositions” (see here). Here, context information and semantics are used to control service compositions giving also a good insight into current research as far as the area of context-awareness is concerned.

Recent developments in mobile communication and small computing devices have had a tremendous impact on our societies. They have brought the dream of ubiquitous computing and communication closer to reality. In the near future the communication and computing devices will enable mass-market scale ubiquitous services and applications. The main challenge will be software that fulfils the needs of personalized, ambient-aware services and applications usable anywhere, anyhow, anytime. A key enabler for this vision is personal networking supporting communication in different kinds of environments: in personal domain, in ad-hoc community, in digital home, and in infrastructure supported networks.

The goal of UST+ is to develop a universal input/output layer for Universal Service Terminals that hides the complexity of application development for personal networking environments. It will be focused on ad-hoc communities (devices cooperating without external infrastructure) and on infrastructure supported networks (devices connected to each other and the external world through a communication infrastructure).

The research challenge is to find a light-weight service layer that ensures dynamic interconnection and collaboration of Universal Service Terminals. UST+ objectives are achieved by producing tangible results: requirements, specifications, prototype implementation, and a proof-of-concept demonstration of a reflective input/output layer. The project contributes to emerging technologies and alternative approaches based on existing future-proof results from IETF, W3C, OMG, JCP, and DLNA.

Consortium

• Fraunhofer FOKUS (Germany)
• TwonkyVision GmbH (Germany)
• Bijing University of Posts & Telecommunications (BUPT) (China)
• Starpoint Telecommunication Software Co (China)