The Design Principles and Practices of Interoperable Smart Spaces - Advanced Design Approaches to Emerging Software Systems - page 19

Chapter 2

The Design Principles and
Practices of Interoperable
Smart Spaces

Eila Ovaska
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Finland

Tullio Salmon Cinotti
Università di Bologna, Italy

Alessandra Toninelli 1
INRIA, France

ABSTRACT

Smart spaces provide information about physical environments, shared with inherently dynamic appli-
cations. This chapter introduces a novel development approach with its focus on two key properties of
smart space applications: the ability to interoperate and behave in a situation-sensitive manner. Sixteen
principles are defined in order to guide the development of an interoperability platform for smart spaces
and on how to create applications on top of it. The interoperability platform deals with information and
is agnostic with respect to ontologies, programming languages, service frameworks, and communication
technologies. The interoperability platform also supports extensibility, evolvability and context based
adaptation, which allows new applications to be added and to behave in a situation based manner. Agile
application development is based on scenario specifications, implemented by the means of the ontology
and model driven development. The approach has been applied to the development of smart personal
spaces, smart indoor spaces, and smart city applications.

INTRODUCTION sensor networks that produce a large amount of

data to be analyzed and reacted to by users or/
and devices (Hadim & Mohamed 2006). Since
the number of these devices is increasing, the
amount of information to be processed by people
and devices is also rising. In order to handle the

Everyday life can be enriched by services that
exploit pervasive computing environments, which
are embedded into our surroundings. These com-
puting environments rely heavily on sensors and