Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
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The Internet provides multi-domain assis-
tance, disregarding the user situation.
information, which is available to all users. No
domain specific infrastructures, no niche market,
no cost and time-to-market problems, thanks to the
Internet technologies. The Internet is, however,
largely unaware of the situation, location and en-
vironmental conditions of its users, and therefore,
it can not filter out the information which is to be
provided, based on the situation. On the other hand,
due to its universal market size, it can afford huge
investments and its technologies are progressing
very fast. In this respect, the greatest challenge
faced by the Internet in recent years was turning
information representation from being machine
readable to machine understandable (Berners-Lee
et al. 2001), and the semantic web technologies
went a long way in this direction (Lassila 2007).
Bringing together the interoperability and the
information centric, universal and multi-domain
approach, enabled by the semantic web with the
dynamicity, adaptability, and usability of context-
aware applications, was the next step which smart
spaces enabled.
Smart spaces (Sofia 2010) lead to an extremely
simple and general approach to turn the informa-
tion which is originated from the environment into
a shared commodity. A smart space is a digital
entity where the relevant real-world information
(i.e. information about the environment and the
objects therein located) is stored in an interoper-
able, machine understandable format, kept up
to date and made available to unanticipated and
authorized situation dependent applications.
Therefore, the smart spaces may be considered to
be the ultimate convergence between the Internet
and context-aware computing. The beauty of smart
spaces is their simplicity, their inherent being
agnostics with respect to the information stored
and their interoperability. The interoperability is
based on a shared knowledge model, and govern-
ing the life cycle of this model is currently one
of the most interesting and relevant challenges in
the smart space research.
The vision behind smart spaces is that if all of
the information about the surrounding environ-
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Interoperable smart spaces provide multi-
domain assistance, optimized to the user
situation.
Context-aware computing is the proposed
solution to deal with the overload of information,
particularly when mobile. It intends to provide an
answer to the need of getting the best possible
content/service in the most suitable format with
respect to the activity in which the user is cur-
rently engaged. Its principle is shown in Figure
1 (top left): users perceive their dynamically
changing environment and situation with their
senses. Devices sense the same through sensors
and associated reasoning. Therefore, the user and
the device share their perception of the environ-
ment, so that services can adapt to the situation,
while the interaction and content exchange runs
smoothly and is contextualized. The key ques-
tions are: How feasible and expensive is it to
provide such context-awareness, and how feasible
and expensive is it to build and maintain a set
of contextualized data (and services) with their
management system?
In fact, two of the greatest challenges, the
same that were originally faced by context-aware
applications, are the cost-effectiveness and the
time-to-market. Applications are domain or/and
application specific, as any application requires a
different view of the environment. The collection
of information from the environment is a difficult
and expensive task, mainly due to the diversity
of the technology used and to the uncertainty
inherent in the sensing systems. Therefore, the
development and deployment time is likely to be
very long and the costs high. Thus, the collected
information needs to be shared to become viable,
but this is difficult as, with reference to Figure 1
top left, there are as many environments as there
are applications.
On the one hand, the Internet is a flat ocean
of shared, uncommitted and machine readable
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