Marco P. Locatelli

CASMAS: supporting collaboration in pervasive environments

The paper proposes a model to design collaboration supports in pervasive environments through the notion of community. As in human communities, the degree of participation of a member can dynamically change in relation both to her physical location and to her position in the logical space of the applications the community uses to cooperate. The paper shows how this approach is able to make pervasive environments reactive to user behavior on the basis of a semantically rich context representation

Artificial Societies in a Community-Based Approach to Ambient Intelligence

This paper presents an agent-based approach to the modeling, design and engineering of ambient intelligence systems. The introduced approach balances the management of the complexity related to the enactment of an ambient intelligence scenario between the agents and the structured environment they populate. The dynamics of local actions and interactions of agents situated in this environment originates the overall organized system behaviour. The environment is shaped according to the notion of active coordination artifact, whose seminal definition was given in Computer Supported Cooperative Work literature by Schmidt and Simone and then evolved in other research contexts. A technique to configure and interact with such environments, i.e. the composition of device functionalities according to their high-level features, and services provided, is presented. A scenario is used as an in-depth example, and the architecture of a sample system implementing the same scenario using our reference middleware is discussed.

Grounding ecologies on multiple spaces

The paper introduces an architectural model, which pairs virtual and physical ecologies into augmented ecologies. The notion of space as a first class concept fosters a neat separation of the two main parts of an ecology: the environment and the organisms it contains. Virtual organisms view the common environment through multiple ecology spaces, described in terms of core space models and related by mappings between locations. This leads to a flexible space-aware paradigm supporting the indirect communication between organisms, including both message passing and data sharing. Finally, the paper presents a concrete framework reifying the model and an example application.

An Experimental Analysis of Undo in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

All personal computer application are provided with an undo functionality, which can implement any of the models available in literature. Users are generally aware of what the undo function is expected to do, depending on the application in use. Ubiquitous computing systems are beginning to be understood and deployed in real life situations, but little attention has been paid to what users expect themselves to be able to do and undo in such systems. In this paper, we present the results of a survey we made to evaluate the perception of undo mechanisms with respect to a simple ubiquitous-computing environment. Our study shows that users already have a complex vision of undo encompassing advanced features such as context awareness and compensation.

End-users’ Integration of Applications and Devices: A Cooperation Based Approach

The current organizational and technological evolution suggests to conceive tailorability and EUD also in terms of integration of off the shelf applications and devices that support collaboration. To this aim this chapter proposes an approach that leverages the ability of actors to coordinate their activities and then grounds integration on the notion of cooperation. The resulting technological environment is presented and illustrated through a case derived from an ongoing project. Some considerations derived from a short experimentation conclude the chapter.

Supporting valorization of cultural heritage documentation: The TIVal portal approach

Valuable documents are included in the corpus of information, documentation, digital contents produced in the course of projects aimed at studying and defining a preservation (and possibly restoration) plan for a significant piece of cultural heritage. These documents could be exploited to effectively further valorize the cultural heritage and support its fruition by a wide audience of potential users. The TIVal project aims at supporting the integration of this kind of different, distinct and heterogeneous multimedia contents into a comprehensive and accessible portal. The latter proposes specific navigation paths, dynamically connecting the different contents according to a specific logical rationale of the path itself (e.g. show information supporting a critical analysis of a piece of cultural heritage). To support the dynamic creation of these paths, contents are organized by means of the adoption of a domain ontology derived from CIDOC CRM. The paper presents the rationale of the approach, the architecture of the system, the structure of the ontology, and relevant examples of its usage by specific navigation paths.

A pervasive computing architecture fostering integration in patient centred communities of care

The paper shows how a pervasive computing architecture, CASMAS, and its associated modelling language can be used to support cooperation among the members of a patient-centred community of care and their digital devices. We also show how CASMAS can be augmented by the WOAD framework, which was developed independently to model and express declarative mechanisms of provision of awareness promoting information (API) in document-mediated communities. Parts of these mechanisms can be modelled on the basis of integrated care pathways taken from the medical specialist literature. We take the distributed hypertension monitoring case as an exemplifying and sufficiently complex scenario to show the feasibility and advantages of our semantically informed and modular approach. The scenario is then declined in terms of architectural components and cooperation-oriented mechanisms that are shared between the devices and entities of the designed community of care.