Ocean: Community-Based, Real-World Ubicomp

The rapid expansion of networked computation into our everyday lives often results in physical environments with an increased potential for Ubicomp support. Often times, however, Ubicomp support is underutilized due to the nature of many real-world networked resources; which are often highly heterogeneous, unsystematically organized, unpredictably available and not inherently interoperable. To overcome these challenges, the ISNM Ambient Ocean project (Ocean) is exploring novel ways of harnessing the collective wisdom of users operating within these complex environments. In Ocean, we assume networked resources will rarely provide a means for deploying heavyweight Ubicomp software components. Rather, we are developing a plug-in-centric, smart-client framework which enables appropriate client components to be installed on-demand; including plug-ins for context detection, resource control, protocol adaptation and collaborative filtering. We hypothesize that plug-in-based extensibility combined with community-based collaborative filtering will help improve and simplify adhoc compositions of potentially powerful ambient resources.