Design of a middleware and HIML (Human Interaction Markup Language) for context aware services in a ubiquitous computing environment

Abstract

Ubiquitous computing environments consist of a lot of autonomous agents that work together to alter real world space into intelligent and interactive environments. Research in context awareness, which is regarded as core technologies of ubiquitous computing, offers intellectual services by extracting, interpreting, and using context information and adapts each device's functionality to the current context of use. Many researchers have tried to define context and there have been many approaches on how to make applications adaptive to the user's behavior patterns and the awareness of context information that surrounds the user. However these approaches concentrate on prototype systems, and are far from real-world service environments. In this paper, we propose a middleware architecture, which focuses on user interaction using HIML. We designed HIML to describe and construct context messages among context aware agents and store them into a database for later use, with universal applicability to all kinds of devices. The architecture design and HIML proposed can be applied to most services under a ubiquitous computing environment. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.