Jorge García Duque

Controlling the smart home from TV

In this paper we introduce a cooperative environment between the interactive digital TV (IDTV) and the networked home with the aim of allowing the interaction between interactive TV applications and the controllers of the in-home appliances in a natural way. Concretely, we have selected the MHP (multimedia home platform) standard, well-known in the IDTV field, and OSGi (open service gateway initiative), the most widely used open platform to set up residential gateways. To overcome the radically different conceptions below these two specifications we define a new kind of application, coined as XbundLET, which acts as a bridge between both worlds allowing MHP applications to use the OSGi services and vice versa, i.e., allowing OSGi applications to take advantage of the MHP functionality. As a further step towards integrated residential gateways, we also propose a semantic description for OSGi services at the smart home that facilitates services discovery and invocation from broadcast MHP applications.

Enhancing Residential Gateways: A Semantic OSGi Platform

The OSGi (open service gateway initiative) service platform specification is the most widely adopted technology for building a control system for the networked home. Three main features contribute to its success. First, it supports various well-known protocols, simplifying communication among home devices. In addition, it defines a cooperative model for applications to dynamically discover and use services provided by others. Finally, it allows flexible remote management of these applications and the services they provide. So, an OSGi solution supports decentralization, diversification, and ubiquity not only in smart homes but in pervasive environments generally.

SCTL-MUS : A formal methodology for software development of distributed systems. A case study

Abstract. This paper introduces an iterative model for the software development process of distributed systems. It is based on dealing with the system evolution and maintenance activities as similar stages of the system development. In order to formalise this model, a multi-valued causal temporal logic, referred to as Simple Causal Temporal Logic (SCTL), is defined for the acquisition and specification of the functional requirements. A Model of Unspecified States (MUS) is also defined with a double goal: firstly, to show the fundamental aspects of system behaviour, which has been specified through a set of SCTL requirements; and, secondly, to verify the consistency and completeness of the specified requirements.The combination of SCTL and MUS allows obtaining the specification of the initial architecture of the system formally. Besides, the design decisions are stored with the goal of making the evolution and maintenance tasks easier. The translation between MUS and a constructive formal description technique (LOTOS) is automatic from the definition of architectural operators.

AVATAR: ENHANCING THE PERSONALIZED TELEVISION BY SEMANTIC INFERENCE ∗

The generalized arrival of Digital TV will lead to a significant increase in the amount of channels and programs available to end users, making it difficult to find interesting programs among a myriad of irrelevant contents. Thus, in this field, automatic content recommenders should receive special attention in the following years to improve assistance to users. Current approaches of content recommenders have significant well-known deficiencies that hamper their wide acceptance. In this paper, a new approach for automatic content recommendation is presented that considerably reduces those deficiencies. This approach, based on the so-called Semantic Web technologies, has been implemented in the AVATAR tool, a hybrid content recommender that makes extensive use of well-known standards, such as TV-Anytime and OWL. Our proposal has been evaluated experimentally with real users, showing significant increases in the recommendation accuracy with respect to other existing approaches.

On the interplay between inconsistency and incompleteness in multi-perspective requirements specifications

A major challenge for dealing with multi-perspective specifications, and more concretely, with merging of several descriptions or views is toleration of incompleteness and inconsistency: views may be inconclusive, and may have conflicts over the concepts being modeled. The desire of being able to tolerate both phenomena introduces the need to evaluate and quantify the significance of a detected inconsistency as well as to measure the degree of conflict and uncertainty of the merged view as the specification process evolves. We show in this paper to what extent disagreement and incompleteness are closely interrelated and play a central role to obtain a measure of the level of inconsistency and to define a merging operator whose aim is getting the model which best reflects the combined knowledge of all stakeholders. We will also propose two kinds of interesting and useful orderings among perspectives which are based on differences of behavior and inconsistency, respectively.

Making the most of TV on the move: My newschannel

The increasing success of mobile-TV (m-TV) is changing the habits and customs in TV consumption which now extends to parts of the day when viewers are not at home and, mainly, within short intervals between other daily activities. Since much m-TV consumption will be in spare time, offering the users contents they are interested in becomes extremely important to provide an attractive service which does not discourage potential users. Using DVB-H as transport infrastructure, in this paper we introduce a personalization architecture which perfectly fits in with the value chain of m-TV. By applying semantic models and techniques, personalized virtual channels are dynamically constructed by adequately combining several kinds of contents according to the users interests. While the personalization architecture is particularized, in this paper, to provide news channels, it could be easily generalized to other fields.

Composing requirements specifications from multiple prioritized sources

The formal methodology MultiSpec supports the evolution of software specifications gathered from multiple perspectives. A viewpoint-based approach is used to explicitly separate the descriptions provided by different stakeholders, and concentrate on identifying and resolving conflicts between them. The challenge addressed in this article consists in taking into account that some views may have greater degrees of relevance and, consequently, their opinion will have more importance when either obtaining the merged model or resolving the contradictions. To this end, we propose a priority-based approach, where such priority value is twofold. On the one hand, it considers external factors to the perspectives such as the importance assigned to each view by the analyst depending on who is specifying the view or the amount of stakeholders involved in that specification. On the other hand, this priority value also considers internal factors related to the quality of the views and, in order to be able to quantify this value, MultiSpec proposes two measures: coverage and density of each perspective which will be combined in a completeness value. The contributions of this approach will be clearly illustrated through a simple example.The formal methodology MultiSpec supports the evolution of software specifications gathered from multiple perspectives. A viewpoint-based approach is used to explicitly separate the descriptions provided by different stakeholders, and concentrate on identifying and resolving conflicts between them. The challenge addressed in this article consists in taking into account that some views may have greater degrees of relevance and, consequently, their opinion will have more importance when either obtaining the merged model or resolving the contradictions. To this end, we propose a priority-based approach, where such priority value is twofold. On the one hand, it considers external factors to the perspectives such as the importance assigned to each view by the analyst depending on who is specifying the view or the amount of stakeholders involved in that specification. On the other hand, this priority value also considers internal factors related to the quality of the views and, in order to be able to quantify this value, MultiSpec proposes two measures: coverage and density of each perspective which will be combined in a completeness value. The contributions of this approach will be clearly illustrated through a simple example.

Incremental specification with SCTL/MUS-T: a case study

The past decade witnessed a great advance in the field of timed formal methods for the specification and analysis of real-time and safety-critical systems. In this context, timed automata and real-time temporal logics provide a simple, and yet general, way to model and specify the behavior of these systems. At the same time, iterative and incremental development has been massively adopted in professional practice. In order to get closer to this current trend, timed formal methods should be adapted to such lifecycle structures, getting over their traditional role of verifying that a model meets a set of fixed requirements. In the pursuit of this ultimate aim, we propose SCTL/MUS-T, a timed methodology in which many-valuedness let deal with both the uncertainty and the disagreement which are pervasive and desirable in an iterative and incremental process. To illustrate the main ideas behind SCTL/MUS-T methodology this paper focuses on the specification, synthesis and verification of the well known steam-boiler case study.

Bringing Content Awareness to Web-Based IDTV Advertising

In the new technological context of interactive digital (IDTV), traditional TV spots are expected to be replaced by interactive applications. In this paper, we propose a new TV advertising architecture inspired by the philosophy and business models of online advertising. Personalization and content awareness are the two mainstays of our approach that allow advertisers to have more efficient campaigns focused on a targeted audience.

TVGuide2.0: applying the Web2.0 fundamentals to IDTV

In this paper we introduce our experiences in applying the Web 2.0 philosophy to build a TV guide system for Interactive Digital TV (IDTV) platforms. Subscribers give their opinion about TV content and, informally, a folksonomy is progressively built. Based on this shared knowledge, the TV guide obtains personal recommendations and allows users to browse among the multimedia content. Additionally, and over this collaborative layer, a more formal vision enables applying semantic reasoning to supplement the knowledge informally inferred.