WIT (Mícheál Ó Foghlú) organised a workshop on
“Management of Smart Spaces” for the eChallenges
conference 2004 in Vienna. The aim was to
present a summary of theoretical and practical work done in this area of three
domains (the home, the workplace and an educational environment) and at two
levels (the smart space management level and the enabling infrastructure level)
to a mixed audience of industrial researchers and academic researchers
interested in the area of mobile services. The following information documents
the workshop structure and context.
This workshop aims to address the issues surrounding the development of
managed interoperable smart spaces in a number of different domains. At its
simplest, smart spaces are any wireless information
system in which some form of context sensitive behaviour is provided.
The workshop is designed to open up the findings of the Irish HEA-funded
research project M-Zones (http://www.m-zones.org), involving three Irish
research institutions, to international peer-review, and to demonstrate the
linkages to potential future areas of work in managing wireless smart space
environments in the workplace, in a learning environment, and in the home
environment.
The discussion will also draw on the other research projects in which
the participants have been involved including the FP5 research projects Opium
and AlbatrOSS, and others.
The core theme of the workshop is that, whilst much work is being
carried out on individual smart spaces, little thought has been given to
co-ordinated approaches that would allow managed interactions between smart
spaces. The debate is now about how standardised mechanisms can be developed to
allow this new market to be opened up for innovative services.
The main aim of the workshop is to create a forum for the exchange of
ideas between the EU Commission, industry, and the research community around
the core issue of standardisation of the emerging wireless services arena. We
believe it is the first time that the core issue of how these services will be
managed and interoperate has been addressed. In the past most discussion has
been around the benefits of one particular proprietary system or another.
The main benefit for the research groups presenting is to gain a deeper
understanding of the constraints imposed by real world deployments of these
largely theoretical or laboratory-based systems.
The main benefit for industry is to see how the emerging theories can
help build interoperable and manageable systems in the future.
An important issue that many heavily managed systems to date have been
conceived, developed and deployed within a pure telecommunications environment.
In contrast, the open nature of the public IP-based network has led to a
diversity of relatively unmanaged systems on the Internet.
The telecommunication industry's desire to push 2.5G and 3G services,
and the wide spread popularity of alternative (some would call disruptive)
wireless technologies such as WiFi and Bluetooth, are
helping create many possibilities for the future of wireless services.
Therefore it is important that these types of debates occur in an informed
environment.
The core structure is of 4 * 15 min presentations with discussion after
each and discussion at the end. The primary purpose is to stimulate and
encourage this discussion, rather than describe how good our current and/or
previous projects have been. The core focus is future directions rather than
existing systems.
1) Mícheál Ó Foghlú (TSSG, WIT): Infrastructure
Issues for Smart Spaces
This talk will summarize the
themes of the workshop, and address the underlying requirements for the
enabling infrastructure for smart space management and interoperability. This
will focus on what is achievable today by using results from various open
source projects, and initiatives and by predicting the potential future
adoption of technologies (e.g. IPv6).
2) David Lewis (Trinity College Dublin): Management of
Smart Spaces - a Telecommunications Perspective
This will be a theoretical
look at how concepts from telecommunications management can be adapted to the
use of smart space management. It will draw on Dave's experiences in TCD, and
previously at UCL, London.
3) Sven van der Meer (TSSG, WIT): Management
of Smart Spaces - a Computing Perspective
This talk will look at the
same domain of smart space management, but from a computer networking
perspective. This talk with draw on Sven's experiences in the
TSSG, WIT and on his prior experience in FHG Fokus,
Berlin.
4) Dirk Pesch (Cork Institute of
Technology): Network resource management for wireless smart spaces
For smart spaces to work,
some form of wireless data network is required. This talk will address the
issues and constraints imposed by the various types of wireless network, and on
the primary issues of network resource management.
5) Open Discussion (Chair: Mícheál Ó Foghlú, TSSG, WIT)
Attendees: 3,000
Countries: Wide range of EU and other countries
Presentations: 4 at workshop; Over 200 at conference
Proceedings: Published by IOS Press
eAdoption and the Knowledge
Economy: Issues, Applications, Case Studies
Paul Cunningham and Miriam Cunningham (Eds)
Volume 1, pp. 28-34
IOS Press: Amsterdam; ISBN:
1-58603-470-7
