Device and service descriptions in Personal Distributed Environments

The current research on context-aware systems in ubiquitous environments opens a number of interlinked research challenges. On the lowest level of such systems, discovery mechanisms and flexible semantic descriptions of available devices and services form the basis for end-user service personalization. The challenge is to design a description model that leverages implicit semantic information obtained, while being cognizant of resource constraints of a device. To encounter the different device characteristics and personalization challenges, this paper proposes a device and service description approach that provides a high level contextual view of device information. The work has been performed as part of the Personal Distributed Environment concept, also described in the paper. Further, a user-centric view of multiple user interface devices to access services in a heterogeneous and dynamic networked environment has been implemented by extending UPnP device discovery. A comparison with existing state of the art approaches concludes the work.