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Dear All,<br>
<br>
I have a question of interest for the temporary governing board of
AALOA and all the promoters.<br>
I will call a vote on that, so I kindly ask all the promoters to
read carefully the content of this message,<br>
and to post here any doubt about this operation. Below you find also
my personal comments<br>
<br>
At the AAL Forum, Antonio Kung, Stefano Chessa, me and Jan
Alexandersson ( Head AAL Competence Center<br>
DFKI GmbH) had an interesting discussion about a joint
announcement to publish during the MonAMI workshop <br>
at the 5th European Conference on Smart Sensing and Context (<b>14-16
Nov</b>, Passau, Germany)<br>
<br>
You can read the story in the attached message, but for your
convenience below there is the agreed statement<br>
---------------------<br>
<blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-US">(1) As an
initiative for the building of an open source accessibility
framework, OpenURC will focus on features for personalised and
accessible user interfaces. <i style="">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.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-US">(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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="" lang="EN-US"> (3)
Integrating each other contribution</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-US">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="" lang="EN-US"> (4) Towards
convergence</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-US">They further
agree to undertake a discussion in order to work towards a
common architecture.<br>
</span></p>
</blockquote>
-----------------<br>
We decided that the consequent actions of the parties would have
been:<br>
<ul>
<li>OpenURC to check (1)</li>
<li>AALOA to check (2)</li>
<li>All to check (3), (4)</li>
<li>OpenURC to prepare a specific press release announcing its
creation to the press</li>
<li>AALOA to prepare a specific press release announcing its
creation to the press<br>
</li>
<li>Make a press release for the joint announcement<br>
</li>
<li>Make sure that AALOA and OpenURC websites will include the 3
press releases and link to each other</li>
</ul>
<br>
Thus this mail is to open the discussion about such common action
to do and any further collaboration with OpenURC community.<br>
<br>
Here a reference about URC<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://myurc.org/TR/urc-tech-primer">http://myurc.org/TR/urc-tech-primer</a><br>
URC stands for Universal Remote Console Standards (ANSI/INCITS
389-2005 through 393-2005). <br>
<br>
----- <b>my personal comments</b><br>
<br>
At the moment it may sound strange the wording : "<span style=""
lang="EN-US">AALOA components"</span> in (3).<br>
In AALOA we don't have any reference to a common architecture yet. <br>
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. <br>
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 .<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Best regards,<br>
Francesco<br>
<br>
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