Architectural Abstractions for Spaces-based Communication in Responsive Environments

Diego Bernini

Supervisor: Francesco Tisato, Correlator: Carla Simone

Graduation session: October 12, 2012

Ph.D thesis

A Responsive Environment requires the establishment of rich and flexible information flows between users and the environments in which they live.

From a Software Architecture point of view, information flows between users and their environments are mediated by software components that manage specific devices, perform customized tasks and coordinate activities. Hence Responsive Environments necessitates a technological platform supporting the seamless integration of multifarious components via suitable communication mechanisms. The concept of space is a good candidate for reification in terms of communication mechanisms. Space and related keywords (e.g., position, location, area, proximity and distance) are natural reference concepts that users exploit to communicate with and through an environment according to different representations (e.g., name space, organizational space, grid space and so on). However, few approaches in the literature focus on space as a provider of communication mechanisms. Moreover, the existing approaches exclusively consider geo-referenced spatial representations.

This thesis proposes a set of architectural abstractions and a related technological platform to establish information flows in Responsive Environments through a multiple- spaces metaphor.

The architectural abstractions are supported by a concrete framework called Space Integration Services (SIS), which implements the proposed spaces-based communication.