Location Awareness in UbiCollab

Abstract

This assignment was given within the UbiCollab project, which is a platform for Ubiquitous Collaboration. Ubiquitous and Pervasive computing were first coined at the beginning of the 90's, and capture the realization that the computing focus was going to change from the PC to a more distributed, mobile and embedded form of computing. The vision of UbiCollab is to support interaction and collaboration on the internet among geographical dispersed users. UbiCollab treat mobility and ubiquity as inherent properties in social interaction among people. The work in this Master's thesis will take into account that users are distributed and constantly change location according to their daily routine, which enforces the need for location awareness in UbiCollab. This work will focus upon how location should be represented, managed and used in ubiquitous systems like UbiCollab. To achieve this, we will be working on two related platform components; one for managing locations, and one for managing communities. We start with a problem elaboration, which is followed by an analysis of related research. This leads to platform specific requirements, both functional and non-functional. Based on these requirements we propose a design that meets both the functional and non-functional requirements. The design is followed by an implementation of the design. Finally we show the strengths and weaknesses of the design and implementation by implementing a demonstrator called UbiBuddy. This is an enhanced buddy list built on top of the UbiCollab platform, with specific focus on the collaborative support provided by UbiCollab. In our work we have shown the usefulness of location as a resource in collaboration, both by promoting awareness of users in UbiCollab, and by integrating our work with the component managing services. By doing this integration, we have shown how location can be used as a resource for other platform components aiding collaboration.