A clearly specified representation of diverse entities is needed to refer to them in pervasive computing applications. Examples of such entities include physical objects, operations, sensor and actuator resources, or logical locations. We propose a novel way to systematically generate representations of entities for programmable pervasive computing platforms made of tiny embedded nodes. Our original idea is to generate a very lightweight, though semantically-rich, representation from a possibly complex ontological specification. At the platform development phase, a domain ontology is used to describe the target environment. A preprocessing tool produces the ontologydriven, lightweight representation, which comes in two flavors: a humanreadable one, to be used for programming, and a binary one, to be used at runtime. Our approach makes it possible to take advantage of all the benefits of ontology-based modeling and, at the same time, to obtain a representation light enough to be embedded in even the tiniest nodes.
Size and complexity of current application programming interfaces (APIs) result in a relatively high amount of effort needed to find operations of desired functionality. With semantic annotation of APIs, the searching process can be automated. This paper identifies and discusses four methods of offering the operation discovery functionality to users. In each method different kind of information is taken as input; each method can be useful for programmers with different background and experience.
The paper presents a programming model for a new pervasive computing middleware. The middleware, called ROVERS, targets an environment composed of tiny, resource-constrained, wirelessly communicating nodes embedded into everyday objects. The environment is heterogeneous in that each node is equipped with a unique set of sensors and actuators. The nodes establish an ad-hoc network and contribute their specific resources. The ROVERS layer transforms the network into a distributed pervasive computing platform. The ROVERS application is an evolving tree of cooperating, mobile micro-agents. The tree adapts to available resources and the current context. It is largely decoupled from the concept of the physical node. ROVERS provides the programmer with implicit resource discovery, inter-agent communications with logical addressing, minimization of applicationgenerated traffic, ontology-driven representation of sensor and actuator resources, as well as support for component-based programming. The programming model lends itself to an implementation for a miniature operating system, like TinyOS.
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