An Ambient Intelligent Prototype for Collaboration
Violeta Damjanovic (2007): An Ambient Intelligent Prototype for Collaboration In: Ned Kock (Ed.). Encyclopedia of E-Collaboration, IGI Globus Publications, 2007
The development of Web 2.0 has lead to a dramatic shift in the whole Web community. The decentralized and asynchronous applications are becoming prevalent both in Web-based and ubiquitous environments. In Webbased environments, each service (agent, application, Web service, learning object, mobile device, sensor) can be accessed through a single point, usually a Web portal, whereas in a ubiquitous environment, a service is dynamically composed by several agents that need to coordinate and negotiate with the aim of providing the most suitable adaptation for the user. In ubiquitous environments, distributed sensors follow the user’s movements and based on either the user’s typical tasks or the user’s characteristics and preferences (learned from history and features of the context) appropriate adaptations of the interface, ambient features or functionality are made. Instead of having isolated user models for each application, a ubiquitous environment presumes the existence of a community of adaptive applications sharing user information.
In decentralized settings, each player maintains a small, locally created user model/profile, as needed for its own adaptation needs. Each person acts differently and needs to develop his/her own skills in own way.
What makes the difference now is the availability of an advanced technology that enables us to rebuild learning and collaboration and make them more interactive, individualized, and adaptive. Nevertheless many difficult research challenges still remain, and much work is still needed if the existing relevant technologies are to be applied for the adaptation purposes in ubiquitous applications and the Semantic Web collaborative environment.
In this chapter, we explore the impact of ambient intelligence (AmI) on collaborative learning and experimental environments aiming to point out some new and upcoming trends in the professional collaboration on the Web. The chapter starts with some introductory explanations of both Web-based and ubiquitous environments. In addition, an overview of the relevant research issues is given. These issues represent the key paradigms on which the conceptual design of the AmIART prototype is based, and embrace the following facets: Ambient Intelligence, online experimenting, and personalized adaptation. The main idea of the AmIART prototype is to give users the feeling of being in training laboratories and working with real objects (paintings, artifacts, experimental components). Then, the AmIART prototype for fine art online experimenting is discussed in the sense of e-collaboration. When online experiments are executed in the Semantic Web environment, remote control of experimental instruments is based on knowledge that comes from domain ontologies and process ontologies (semantic-based knowledge systems). For these purposes, we present the ontology ACCADEMI@VINCIANA, as an example of a domain ontology (professional training domain), as well as the ontology GUMO (general user model and context ontology) that consists of a number of classes, predicates and instances aimed at covering all situational states and models of users, systems/devices and environments. In the following section, a collaborative scenario of using the AmiART prototype is given. The last section contains some conclusion remarks.
