FDX

Electronic devices have been used for the support of everyday tasks in domestic and professional environments for some time now. Currently, there is a tendency towards a combined application of individual gadgets that are connected within locally confined environments via a diversity of protocols and technologies like UPnP, WLAN and Bluetooth. As one step further in this direction, there is the vision of devices that are globally and uniformly connected through the WWW, extending the Mobile Web to a Ubiquitous Web. Hence, this allows for scenarios where actions on one device can trigger events on an arbitrary other device, and where third-party Web services from anywhere in the world are involved. Ultimately, this results in federations of devices and Web services belonging to different households, companies, suppliers and service providers, forming new kinds of Web applications that integrate devices as an additional dimension. To fulfill this vision, solutions are required that are able to abstract from the different device implementations and bridge the gap between the device and the Web. In this paper, we present the Federated Device Assembly (FDX) approach that offers an integrated management platform for wrapping and as such connecting arbitrary devices to enable new forms of Web applications along with the means to model such federations. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the required infrastructure systems can be realized by introducing a reference architecture and a generic Web service interface.