Building a Middleware Infrastructure for Capture and Access Applications

Capture and access applications automate the capture of and the access to live experiences and are a main theme in the ubiquitous computing research area. Examples of such applications have been built in the educational, office and meeting domains, and most of them make extensive use of network communication, multimedia streaming and storage systems. Despite their common needs and architectural similarities, there is a lack of middleware support for building capture and access applications. The literature reports on efforts towards providing network abstractions that make communication between applications transparent. Leveraging off that work, we present in this paper a set of component-based infrastructures and services providing capture and access applications with abstractions for functionality and distributed data management. To illustrate the utility of our approach, we detail its use in the implementation of a live lecture capture system.