An object-oriented framework for common abstraction and the comet-based interaction of physical u-objects and digital services

Abstract

One essential feature of ubiquitous computing is to process the information of real objects in real environments surrounding the users to offer novel services to people in their daily lives. Such kind of information is often taken from small devices that are embedded into physical objects called u-objects, and distributed in surrounding places such as rooms and offices. A ubiquitous system generally involves many physical u-objects and their dynamic interactions with digital services, i.e., software entities residing in different machines. To overcome the great heterogeneity of u-objects and digital services as well as platforms and networks used, various frameworks have been proposed and tested. However, there still exist many problems to gracefully integrate these physical u-objects and digital services, and let them seamlessly interact with each other. Therefore, this study is focused on a ubiquitous framework that maps all physical u-objects and digital services commonly into their corresponding abstracted objects, and enables all the objects to interact based on message exchanges via the Comet Web server using the HTTP protocol which is platform independent and able to run on many kinds of physical networks. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.