The Design Principles and Practices of Interoperable Smart Spaces - Advanced Design Approaches to Emerging Software Systems - page 21

RELATED WORK AND
BACKGROUND

The objective of this chapter is to provide a
practical way to develop intelligent applications
for physical spaces, by exploiting existing hard-
ware and software technologies and enhancing
them for an integration environment. The aim is
to encourage smart space managers to enhance
spaces with added value services, by exploiting
the information which is freely available in these
spaces. So, the main goal is thus not to only support
the integration of legacy systems and devices, but
persuade smart space managers to innovate new
services which are based on shared information.
To this end, we elaborate the existing technolo-
gies that provide advances to transform to smart
environments. Thereafter, we introduce our way
of developing smart spaces and their intelligent
applications. The approach has already provided
positive signs of an improved and shared under-
standing, especially in terms of interoperability,
adaptivity and advanced user experiences.

This section first introduces the motivations and
characteristics of smart spaces from four view-
points: history, business, application fields and
technology. Thereafter, the current research works
concerned with interoperability, context-aware-
ness and design methodologies are discussed.

Smart Spaces

Smart spaces are a milestone along the history of
computer science, as they mark the convergence
of two previously separate domains: Internet and
Context-aware computing (Figure 1).

• Context-aware computing provides do-

main-specific assistance, optimized to the
user situation.

Figure 1. Comparing the models of Context-aware computing (top left), Internet (top right) and Smart
Space