OWCG

A major goal for wearIT@work is the design and development of the European Wearable Computing Framework (EWCF), which aims at being a standardized, flexible, and effective platform that attracts the interest and consensus of the major players in the area of development of applications for wearable devices.

The EWCF is expected to evolve the engineering and development of software applications for wearable devices from the current niche’s position to a mature
and widespread technology, which can rely on tested, standard-based and
reusable components and tools, and deliver effective solutions for real-life work environments.

The EWCF is meant to be a service-oriented software infrastructure that supports the construction of domain specific applications for wearable devices; applications can seamlessly take advantage of its functionalities and capabilities. Such an infrastructure is intended to simplify the software development process, to encourage reuse of software components/services across different applications,
and to promote better software engineering practices.

Besides specific service-areas addressed in other chapters of this document (such as multimedia, mobile, security, communication, multimodality, etc.), the EWCF can benefit from standardization effort related to service-oriented and component-oriented architecture.

Most of the currents standardization effort on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is done at enterprise level; in wearIT@work there are some interesting aspect that are close to SOA, but the project obviously addresses a different level of computational power than what is available in an enterprise. Furthermore the inherent mobility of the user of a wearable devices brings some new aspects into the classical scenario of SOA.

The EWCF could benefit from standards that allow the dynamic distribution of computing tasks among different systems exploiting different services.For example, an application (running on a wearable device with limited computational power) could delegate some tasks to stationary services eventually available on more powerful computers that are present in the environment. This scenario presents a challenging mix of mobility (the user of a wearable device is potentially moving very often), context-detection (device/computer available in the environment, network connectivity) and service dynamic discovery and invocation (service availability, cost …) and security (authorization to use a service, trust, privacy …)

Many standardization bodies are addressing several of the above mentioned topics:

- W3C: Web Services Activity, SOAP (XML Protocol Working Group), etc.;

- OASIS: Web Services, Computing Management, Security, SOA, UDDI, etc.;

- Global Grid Forum: distributed computing, responsiveness to change, etc.

Finally, two other interesting areas where wearIT@work EWCF services could benefit from participation in standardization effort are the following:

- The Java Community Process has several Java Specification Requests, some of which may be of interest for the Java implementation of the EWCF. A few examples are JSR 256 (Mobile Sensor API), JSR 257 (Contact-less Communication API) and JSR 259 (Ad Hoc Networking API).

- It is foreseeable that wearIT@work will eventually come up with the necessity of having vocabularies to share information among heterogeneous services, components, and platforms. It seems interesting to explore the use of RDF for such purpose, although this must be evaluated in the scope of the limited computational capabilities offered by wearable devices.