This is an old revision of the document!
As said in the presentation of this research group, we are working on pervasive computing: In the future, people will be surrounded by mobile and embedded devices all the time. In such a setting, context will play an important role. The context consists of all the information and services that are reachable by user devices at each given point in time. Examples include geographical location, time of day, temperature, other users in the environment, their respective context information, and so on. Finally, the software that runs on user devices is influenced by such context information, and the software should ultimately display different behavior according to the context of use.
One may wonder why new referencing abstractions are required for mobile networks. In order to motivate the need for new referencing abstractions at the language level, we list a number of desirable properties of remote references for mobile networks which current remote referencing abstractions do not offer:
Ambient references unify two concepts: they are both a peer-to-peer discovery channel and an asynchronous communication channel to a remote object.
- Composition of context-dependent application behaviours using prototype-based solutions (delegation hierarchies, split objects, subjective objects etc.). - Context-dependent adaptations of behaviour using role-based models. - Rule-based systems for context reasoning and role selection. - Role-based communications. - Combining actor and role models for the development of context-dependent applications. - Ad-hoc and intentional actor grouping. - Intra and Inter actor layers for context-dependent adaptations. - Dynamic scope for context-dependent communications.
A detailed explanation of ambient references can be found in this technical report.
Ambient References: Addressing Objects in Mobile Networks. Tom Van Cutsem, Jessie Dedecker, Stijn Mostinckx, Elisa Gonzalez Boix, Theo D'Hondt, Wolfgang De Meuter. In Technical Report VUB-PROG-TR-06-10, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2006 [ download ]