The idea of ubiquitous computing has been with us for decades, but with the advent of endless mobile devices, the internet of things, and other such technology, we are on the verge of living in a world of smart environments that can enhance and make more efficient many aspects of our working lives as well as our social and family lives.
Researchers from Italy, writing in the aptly titled International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, explain that for ubiquitous computing to work well for everyone its design and implementation have to take into account the needs and wants of different types of user. “Connecting objects to the internet and making them accessible from remote is not sufficient to make an environment ‘smart’ since such ecosystems should also be able to enable context-sensitive actions along with management of the interaction between objects and users,” they explain.
As such, the team is now proposing GOOSE – goal-oriented orchestration for smart environments. This platform, the team from the University of Catania and Tim Jol Wave explains, aims to interpret the goals of users, whether technologically expert or novices, as expressed in natural language in order to generate, select, and safely enforce a set of plans to be executed to fulfill those goals as well as focusing taking into account the bigger picture in the smart environment. In other words, “The architecture defined in this paper enables cooperative interactions between objects in a smart space in order to achieve goals expressed by users,” the team writes. Critically, the platform is as far as is possible independent in its structure of any particular technology, hardware, or software.
Catania, V., La Delfa, G.C., Monteleone, S., Patti, D., Ventura, D. and La Torre, G. (2019) ‘GOOSE: goal oriented orchestration for smart environments’, Int. J. Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, Vol. 32, No. 3, pp.159–170.