Vision

One of the first issues, which we addressed, was about the right keywords for the Manifesto. In fact, if on the one hand a specific keyword may attract the attention of a specific community, on the other hand it may discourage the involvement of another community. Under this respect, the identification of the set of keywords, which best represents AALOA, is an issue that will appear again in each revision of the Manifesto and which everybody interested in AALOA is invited to contribute to with suggestions and proposals.

A list of similar keywords, coined in the last decades, can be found in Prof. Alois Ferscha's slides that were presented at the consultation meeting on "Communication Paradigms for 2020", held in Brussels on 3 and 4 March 2004.

However, beyond any keyword, it is utmost important understanding the paradigm shift behind the AALOA vision. In this regard, we found very useful the short explanation provided by Roberto Saracco in the introduction of the Handbook of mobile middleware:

" Paradigm Evolution
What it is meant by "ubiquitous computing"? This term can be interpreted in at least three ways. It can refer to (1) the pervasiveness of systems providing local processing power, (2) the presence of processing capacity in many objects within any environment, or (3) the possibility of accessing processing power at any point to satisfy any processing need. In the first meaning, the focus is basically on the progressive dissemination of PCs, laptops, and personal digital assistants (PDAs). In the second meaning, the focus is on smart objects — everyday objects that are modified by embedding the processing power necessary to interact with the environment and to process information locally. This application is sometimes referred to as "pervasive computing." In the third meaning, the focus is on connectivity, on a network able to connect any processing request with processing capabilities residing in some other place. In this meaning, the attention shifts to grid structures. All of these three meanings are of interest for the topic at hand.

One for Many, One Each, Many for One,
Many for Everybody
In the beginning, man created the mainframe. And this was so expensive and so complex that only few elected could access it and share its resources. Hence, one for many ! At one time, it was difficult to imagine that many companies, not to mention many people, would need to access processing resources. Then the PC arrived and the paradigm shifted to one each. Now people have laptops, PDAs, cellphones, and organizers, and the paradigm has shifted to many for one . Let's look at this last paradigm and consider that "many" also includes the pocket calculator, the car navigator, the remote control — basically any object that in one way or another is processing today information." ... "A transformation of the business is likely to derive from the penetration of microprocessors into everyday objects, as this would create a market size at least one order of magnitude larger than the current one. Smart objects and grids are the next revolution. Ubiquitous disappearing computers along with the supporting communications and software infrastructures discussed here are likely to be the "brave new world." This creates a new paradigm. When computers are embedded in any object and they have become invisible, they are no longer "your" computers; instead, they are shared with everybody. Does the market really need this kind of paradigm shift, from many for one to many for everybody ?"

The vision, introduced by the Manifesto, moves from the idea that the increased communication capabilities should be easily used by programmers that want to write added value services. For example, a nutritional advisor program doesn’t mind if the weight of the assisted person is provided by a Wii fit console or by an enabled Continua scales, as today programs don’t care of knowing whether the video/sound cards are Creative, NVIDIA or others. These devices are connected to the main board buses and abstracted by the Operating System. The middleware running on each networked device should enable similar connections, by providing virtual buses abstraction. The binding to the resources, addressed by programs, are then resolved at run time, by using the middleware capabilities.

Therefore, how our vision is related to the paradigm shift explained above? We are proposing an holistic view of the networked devices: Many as One. A zooming out of a fractal structure, starting from a system on a chip (SoC) and ending to a system on air (SoA). We are interested to aggregate the systems that are locally interconnected, and to consider them as a single unit as a new System. The Home PC will be the set of computational systems interconnected at home. The developer will develop the program as usual, and an installer will deploy the program on the PC. It doesn't mind how many resources are involved, the middleware will check and guarantee the adaptation of the program to the resources available in the environment.

A concise description of what AALOA wishes to realize is represented by few conceptual maps:

• how the middleware is related to the modeling of AAL spaces
• the ordinary way the hardware resources are abstracted by operating systems and programming languages
• the changes we hope take place for laguages of a new generation (AAL/AmI)

AALOA will provide in the near future a tool for the shared editing of conceptual maps in order to give everybody the possibility to submit and propose new ideas regarding the constructs you would have in your preferred programming language. You can also join a mailing-list