Using capability profiles for appliance aggregation

Abstract

appliance aggregation, capability negotiation, device profile, delivery context This paper reviews how several existing standards try to address specific use cases for appliance aggregation. These standards all rely on devices being able to describe their capabilities to other devices. In order to do this, each standard defines its own idiosyncratic profile structure and profile vocabulary. Furthermore applications using this information often need to perform standard tasks such as selection, generation or adaptation based on this information. The problems of devising profile vocabularies, profile structures and matching and selection algorithms are already being explored in the Adaptable Web Delivery Project in HP Labs. This paper discusses the relevance of this work to appliance aggregation and highlights steps that can be taken to resolve the current proliferation of standards. Abstract-This paper reviews how several existing standards try to address specific use cases for appliance aggregation. These standards all rely on devices being able to describe their capabilities to other devices. In order to do this, each standard defines its own idiosyncratic profile structure and profile vocabulary. Furthermore applications using this information often need to perform standard tasks such as selection, generation or adaptation based on this information. The problems of devising profile vocabularies, profile structures and matching and selection algorithms are already being explored in the Adaptable Web Delivery Project in HP Labs. This paper discusses the relevance of this work to appliance aggregation and highlights steps that can be taken to resolve the current proliferation of standards.

Levels of Abstraction in Programming Device Ecology Workflows

“…Future work also involves continuing our prototype implementation of our model in a device ecology workflow engine which supports the translation semantics and fault handling schemes described earlier, and to extend our BPEL4WS lowlevel workflow language with tasks that link to conversation specifications. Moreover, other work on dynamically selecting devices for a particular task such as (Kumar et al, 2003;Butler, 2002) are complementary to our work -techniques can be considered in using semantics to select devices for a workflow at run-time. We are also working on methods to analyze device ecology workflows before execution (Loke and Ling, 2004).…”

“…Approaches to modelling and programming such devices for the home have been investigated, where devices have been modelled as software components, collections of objects (Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, 2002), and Web services (Matsuura et al, 2003). Recent work has developed frameworks for aggregating, composing and building connections among networked devices (Omojokun and Dewan, 2003;Kumar et al, 2003;Butler, 2002;Newman et al, 2002;Kohtake et al, 2003;Vildjiounaite et al, 2003;Sousa and Garlan, 2003;Masuoka et al, 2003). However, there has been little work on specifying at a high level of abstraction (and representing this specification explicitly) how such devices would work together at the user-task or application level, and how such work can be managed.…”