HelpingUserToPrintDocuments

XiaoHangWang Jan 09 2004:

Use case description: Pervasive computing should provide transparent access to a wide range of services from a variety of devices. Services are autonomous, self-descibing computational entities that can be described, published, discovered, accessed in a automated manner.

Priting service assistant:

In a conference scenario, an author who will present at poster session only brings a soft copy of his poster, and wants to print it using a local printer. His priting assistant discovers more than one available local printing services with differnt service discovery protocols(Web Service, UPnP, Jini, etc), knowing their service capabilities(color, size of paper, etc.)and other context(spatial proximity to user, access control policy, queueing time for the service), and chooses a most approperiate one (e.g., it should support color printing and A1 paper, can be timely scheduled before the session begins, and the location of the printer should not be too far away ) to serve on user's behavior. After the printing work finished, the personal assistant guides the user to the collect the poster.

Useful ontologies for supporting these applications:

• Unified service ontology -- A set of standardized ontologies as service descriptions that describe capability, parameters, interfaces, access control policy of frequently-used, chosen services(e.g., in this case, document printing). This service ontology should support mapping between existing service description specifications (e.g., DMAL-S/OWL-S, WSDL, UPnP, Jini, OSGi, etc), thereby serving as a 'bridge' by which different protocols can interoperate.
• Meeting ontology (Schedule of sessions)
• Time ontology (temporal reasoning about queueing time and meeting schedule)
• Location ontology (spatial reasoning to decide proximity)
• Digital document (Size, format, and other parameters)