Ascertaining the Availability of Shared Resources in Ubiquitous Collaborative Environments

Nowadays, organizations include a large number of physical resources (e.g., meeting rooms, classrooms, scanners, and plotters) and virtual ones (e.g., multimedia files, applications, and databases) distributed among different offices, buildings, and storage devices. Typically, these resources have to be shared among colleagues, because it is impossible for each collaborator to own private instances of all the different resources present in the organization. In this way, resource sharing gives collaborators the opportunity of not just lending their resources to other collaborators but also benefitting from the usage of resources they do not own. However, finding shared resources in a huge organization, without a proper technological support, can be a challenge for a member of staff and obviously really hard or even impossible for an external person. To try to overcome this problem, several service discovery protocols have been developed, aiming to promote the use of network services and to reduce configuration tasks. Unfortunately, these protocols are mainly focused on finding ser- vices based just on their type or some minimal features. Such basic searches can be appropriate for services asking for services, but unlike applications, people expect to receive customized information concerning their identity, role, social relations, and even contextual variables (e.g., location). Moreover, people sharing resources (i.e., services) should have the certainty that their resources are not going to be in risk of abuse or bad management. Hence, in this work, we have taken the challenge of proposing a computational support capable of exploiting current available technologies, in order to provide people with a pervasive experience for resource sharing. Our proposal, the Resource Availability Management Service Architecture (RAMS), takes a semantic approach for finding the best available resources for a request, considering the interaction among people in- volved in the resource sharing process and the requester context. Such an interaction includes the evaluation of access rights, usage restrictions, owner relationships, resources, and even owners’ availability. The semantic approach of the RAMS Architecture brings multiple advantages when performing resources discovery, since non-evident relationships between entities can be computed, in order to offer a better and more accurate response for a person’s request. Such a semantic approach is being achieved by modeling the entities involved in the resource sharing process as a set of ontologies, which have been generically designed in order to be de- ployed in any size and type of organizations. Thus, this set of ontologies keeps information of such entities, which can correspond to technical characteristics and capabilities and some dynamic information about the environment. In the latter case, the dynamic information is retrieved from a human recognizer that determines a person’s presence and location by identifying his face and voice and from applications that allow people to change their current availability state or the one of their resources. The ubiquitous experience the RAMS Architecture offers is brought by such a human recognizer and by a resource locator, which in case of a physical resource discovery request, provides users with information about the closest resource available to him.