A COMPACT REFERENCE STRUCTURE FOR MOBILE AND UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING

Mobile and ubiquitous computing should have a shared conceptual space, not
merely a shared address space.  

Having merely a vast number of domain-specific references and user
presentations, with no common language, would relinquish any generality of
human interface or transferrable concepts.  

This confronts us with finding a common reference level for activities as
diverse as pricing and scheduling, news and sports, consumer appliances,
animal and child location, financial microtransactions, medical and
industrial and vehicle monitoring, and of course many more.  

We have implemented a prototype of a conceptually simple, generalized
interactive world which is adaptable to small display panels, small keypads
and audio output.  An extremely simple structure turns out to yield a
default visualization and interface for all system levels, seamlessly
navigated with a few keys.

This common reference level is built of spatial references-- cells with
constrained dimensional connections, and operations upon these cells and
connections.  All persistent states are maintained within this framework.

This design has yielded some surprising benefits.