A task-oriented approach to support spontaneous interactions among users in Urban Computing environments

Urban Computing is an extension of Ubiquitous Computing. It shares common requirements with its predecessor, like context awareness, user centricity, composability and dynamicity. However, a challenging issue of urban computing is to provide available services to diverse, spontaneous social groups. A major requirement for this challenge is spontaneity, which is about supporting social groups by coordinating available services during runtime, without having a previous definition of applications into templates or other predefined descriptions. The approach of task oriented computing realizes these requirements. It is about representing users´ goals in tasks. A task is composed of unit-tasks (basic configurations of abstract services), which are selected based on `placeness´. Placeness consists of the aspects that characterize urban environments and social groups: spatial, temporal, social and personal aspects. The focus of this paper is twofold: first, to provide a semantically-based unit-task description model; second, to propose a unit-task selection algorithm based on placeness on top of the model. The appropriateness of the task selection algorithm is illustrated by a demostration scenario in our campus.