The vision of the Open Pervasive Computing Environment (OpenPCE) is to create a framework that facilitates the development and deployment of pervasive/ubiquitous devices. The environment will provide a rich set of services and frameworks to that end. OpenPCE includes services such as: service brokering, context brokering, ontological management, mediation services, security management. These services are part of the open-pce kernel.These services allow devices (OpenPCE nodes) to be nomadic, transparent, and embedded within an environment (OpenPCE cluster/collective) [Waldrap1]. For example, a group of OpenPCE enabled robots register their services to a service broker. A cluster of OpenPCE enabled data mining compute nodes are also registered. A user calls on an OpenPCE client that brokers on the services of the robots to collect environmental data in a given geographic region. The robots in turn need some data mining services to be performed in the open-pce environment and call on a set of data miners to operated on the data collected. A user can query the status of the task of the environment and update it.

For the user, the robots and data miners is transparent to them, in that they choose a robot, as they would choose a printer for output on a network.

Open-pce can be viewed as a distributed operating environment through which various systems and subsystems can be deployed and managed. Where various devices have to the ability to pervasively plug and play into a OpenPCE environment.

Copyright © Owen McCusker 1997-2008