[aaloa promoters] Preparing a Joint announcement with the OpenURC community

[Francesco Furfari]

  Dear All,

I have a question of interest for the temporary governing board of AALOA 
and all the promoters.
I will call a vote on that, so I kindly ask all the promoters to read 
carefully the content of this message,
and to post here any doubt about this operation. Below you find also my 
personal comments

At the AAL Forum,  Antonio Kung, Stefano Chessa, me and Jan 
Alexandersson ( Head AAL Competence Center
DFKI GmbH)   had an interesting discussion about a joint announcement to 
publish during the MonAMI workshop
at the 5th European Conference on Smart Sensing and Context (*14-16 
Nov*, Passau, Germany)

You can read the story in the attached message, but for your convenience 
below there is the agreed statement
---------------------

    (1) As an initiative for the building of an open source
    accessibility framework, OpenURC will focus on features for
    personalised and accessible user interfaces. /This involves
    discovery of devices and targets, and flexible deployment and
    management of adaptors. It will rely on the specification of
    standards for device descriptions and user interface descriptions./

    (2)  As an initiative for the building of an open source service
    framework, AALOA will focus on features for ambient awareness, and
    for the flexible deployment and management of assisted living
    services. It will rely on the specification of standards allowing
    services to interact with ambient environments.

    * (3) Integrating each other contribution*

    The two initiatives see a potential for sharing developed features
    and specification so that OpenURC-based platforms can integrate
    AALOA components, and AALOA-based platforms can integrate
    OpenURC-based components.

    * (4) Towards convergence*

    They further agree to undertake a discussion in order to work
    towards a common architecture.

-----------------
We decided that the consequent actions of the parties  would have been:

    * OpenURC to check (1)
    * AALOA to check (2)
    * All to check (3), (4)
    * OpenURC to prepare a specific press release announcing its
      creation to the press
    * AALOA to prepare a specific press release announcing its creation
      to the press
    * Make a press release for the joint announcement
    * Make sure that AALOA and OpenURC websites will include the 3 press
      releases and link to each other


Thus this mail is to open the discussion about such common action  to do 
and any further collaboration with OpenURC community.

Here a reference  about URC
http://myurc.org/TR/urc-tech-primer
URC stands for Universal Remote Console  Standards (ANSI/INCITS 389-2005 
through 393-2005).

----- *my personal comments*

At the moment it may sound  strange  the wording : "AALOA components" in 
(3).
In AALOA we don't have any reference to a common architecture yet.
AALOA will grow initially as the aggregation of different projects, 
and a convergence process will be "somehow" created  in the long run. 
Nevertheless it is right to say that the purpose of AALOA is to compare 
the diverse solutions available, in this respect URC has to be taken 
into account and we can encourage its evaluation. However we may only 
advertise all the members of such initiative, any adoption or 
integration of URC standards in this moment is let to the autonomous 
decisions of single projects or individuals of AALOA. As member of 
universAAL project,  I can only anticipate you that further meetings 
will follow in the next months between universAAL members and OpenURC 
community.
Of course it would advisable that an URC-based project was incubated in 
AALOA, it would increase the visibility of URC to all the member 
joining  AALOA. This is something I already suggested to Jan and that he 
will further discuss with URC members .
Said that, aware of the limit of the announcement, I think it is useful 
to increase visibility of our actions and to confirm that  AALOA is 
working as catalyst of interesting initiatives.

Best regards,
Francesco

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