Community Computing - Advanced Design Approaches to Emerging Software Systems - page 198

COMMUNITY COMPUTING In this chapter, we define community comput-

ing and a community computing system. To design
a community computing system, we introduce
community computing models: namely, the simple
community computing model and the static com-
munity situation based community computing
model and distinguish them according to their
intelligence level. In addition, as a means for sys-
tematic development, we present a development
process. As the proposed development process is
based on the MDA (Model-Driven Architecture)
(OMG, 2003) software development approach,
we also provide more detailed models that can
be derived from the most high-level abstraction
model. To verify all the community computing
models and their development processes, we
implement two systems based on CHILDCARE
and COEX-Mall scenarios.
This chapter is organized into 8 sections includ-
ing the present section. An outline of the contents
of the remaining sections is as follows. Section
2 introduces community computing generally.
For better understanding of community comput-
ing, we specify basic concepts of community
computing, especially focusing on community.
In addition, we describe the development steps
from the highest-level abstraction model to an
actual system. In section 3, we distinguish various
community computing models according to the
intelligence level required by problem domains
and then introduce the simple community comput-
ing model as a first step. As an improved model,
we also propose the static community situation
based model. In section 4, we introduce the com-
putational model for community computing, and
in section 5, we show the implementation results
of two small community computing systems: the
CHILDCARE system and COEX-Mall system.
In section 6, we provide some background and
related works. Finally, we conclude this chapter
by acknowledging contributions in section 7, and
we provide a few suggestions as to the direction
of future work in section 8.

Community computing is a computing paradigm
where pervasive services are provided by coop-
eration among existing agents. It focuses on how
to satisfy the requirements of a pervasive system
by cooperation among predefined agents, while
multi-agent based and distributed computing
approaches focus on what agents or distributed
systems are needed to meet the requirements.
In community computing, the requirements of
a community computing system are fulfilled by
communities. A community consists of members,
which cooperate with others in the community to
achieve their common goals. In this section, we
introduce basic terms of community computing.
Among those concepts, we concentrate on com-
munity, and here we introduce the levels of com-
munities and the life model of a community. For
better understanding, we give you the overview
of community computing shown in Figure 1.

Basic Terms of Community
Computing

Before we look into community computing in
detail, it is worthwhile to introduce the basic terms
of community computing. In this subsection, we
define the terms used in community computing
as follows:

1. Space: A space is a dynamically connected
and coordinated set of heterogeneous per-
vasive computing objects. Its boundary is
flexible and extensible due to the mobile
objects. A pervasive object, an agent in a
space, is able to represent various kinds of
software and hardware devices and human
users.
2. Community Computing System: It is a sort
of pervasive computing system providing
pervasive services through communities.