Ryusuke Masuoka (1), Bijan Parsia (2) and Yannis Labrou (1)
In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Semantic Web Conference 2003 ( ISWC 2003), October 20-23, 2003, Sundial Resort, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA
(1)
Fujitsu Laboratories of America, Inc.
8400 Baltimore Avenue, Suite 302
College Park, MD 20740, USA
{rmasuoka,yannis}@fla.fujitsu.com
http://www.flacp.fujitsulabs.com/
(2) MIND Lab, University of Maryland
8400
Baltimore Avenue, Suite 200
College Park, MD 20740, USA
bparsia@isr.umd.edu
http://www.mindswap.org/
Non-expert users have to accomplish non-trivial tasks in application and device-rich computing environments. The increasing complexity of such environments is detrimental to user productivity (and occasionally, sanity). We propose to reduce these difficulties by shifting focus to what users want to do (i.e., on the tasks at hand) rather than on the specific means for doing those tasks. We call this shift in focus "task computing"; we argue that "task computing" offers an incentive to device manu-facturers to incorporate semantic web technologies into their devices in order to get the benefits of easier and more flexible use of their devices' features by end-users.
To support task computing, we developed an environment called a "Task Computing Environment" (TCE), which we have implemented using standard Semantic Web (RDF, OWL, DAML-S), Web Services (SOAP, WSDL) and pervasive computing (UPnP) technologies, we describe and evaluate our TCE implementation, and we discuss how it has been used to realize various device-usage scenarios.