Framework for ubiquitous and voice enabled web applicattions development.

Resumo

The purpose of the Ubiquitous or Pervasive Computing - an emergent paradigm of personalized computation- is to obtain device interoperability under different conditions. The devices were designed for different purposes by different companies or from different technological generations. The ever increasing market of web enabled devices has brought up diverse challenges related to the difficulty of visualizing content in a unified form to diverse clients, while at the same time taking into account the great differences in the capacities of these devices. It is not feasible to develop a separate application for each of these devices, simply because the number of different devices is too high and still growing. In the analysis of existing proposals dealing with the modelling of ubiquitous web applications, the link that exists between the logical and conceptual modelling and the physical modelling of the applications is not clear enough, and the way in which the context aspects related to web access from these devices cannot be specified. On the other hand, the available commercial products are supplier-specific. Every future platform change would a costly and painstaking process In this thesis we present a proposal of a framework for the development of web applications that can be accessed from different types of devices, such as PCs, PDAs, mobile phones based on diverse technologies (like WAP and I-Mode) and conventional telephones that access the web through voice gateways and voice portals. The proposed framework serves as a guide for the development of this type of applications and it can be deployed to different server configurations and software development technologies. In order to obtain this objective, a description of diverse theoretical elements related to dynamic generation of information that can be acceded by devices has been made, as well as a description of involved technologies whose hardware, software and connectivity characteristics vary remarkably. The theoretical study was carried out in parallel with tests based on the different technologies used. A multilingual-ubiquitous traffic information portal was used to test the theory in an operational environment.