Enabling non-programmers to develop smart environment applications

摘要

Smart environments are small worlds where various interconnected devices are continuously working to make inhabitants'' lives more comfortable. Given the variety of different views on what constitutes “more comfortable” and the variety of situations people experience, we believe that the inhabitants of a smart environment must be empowered to easily modify software applications running in it and to mash-up new applications when needed. The following properties are desired: a high level of abstraction in application design, on-the-fly development, flexibility with respect to adding new devices and software components, combination of task-based and opportunistic design processes, and an ability to define policies to restrict users from designing unsafe applications. In this paper, we present a novel framework for semantic software metadata and describe how utilizing it in our application development tool, Smart Modeller, enables non-programmer composition of smart environment applications.