[aaloa supporters] News -- submitted project proposal on ZigBee integration with the OSGi Platform

Tue Dec 21 20:00:31 CET 2010

  Dear Bruno, all,

this mail answers to your comments from two different perspective:

1) *technological aspects*
I'm very happy you have experience with two different ZB development 
kits. It will be very useful, we can discus about this off-line or  
through the proper mailing lists  of the project .

I don't agree with your recommendation. Let me explain better the goal 
of our project.
I would like to achieve a separation of concerns as far as ontology 
definition is concerned.
I attached a picture representing the three-layered model we had in PERSONA.
I think you can easily read the picture representing SAIL (Sensor 
Abstraction and Integration Layer) sub-project of PERSONA.
It was implemented on OSGi,  and only the top most layer concerns with 
the *integration *of a specific technology.
As example, there are two components depicted in the picture, one is the 
the bundle that maps ZB to the UPnP Specification, the second exports 
the interfaces according to PERSONA architecture, that' s by using the 
PERSONA ontology.
Our project wont deal with the *Integration Layer*, but only with the 
first two layer: Access and Abstraction Layer.

IMO there are at least two good reasons for such approach.
a)There are many ontology definitions out there, not only OSGi4AMI, but 
PERSONA, OASIS and standards like ISO11073 ...
So we need to create consensus, and the ZB4OSGI project is not the right 
place to do it.

b) We want to be free to provide a very good solution for ZigBee, 
independently from the strategic objectives of AALOA.
In such way we can assure that other communities will test our software 
and will contribute to the bug fixing.
AALOA in other projects will be able to reuse the ZB4OSGi results 
according to a shared plan.

2)* Organisational aspects*
The federation of projects is an important aspect we introduced in the 
AALOA Manifesto: the glue thanks to which this community is growing.
I quoted here the "Call for Project Proposal" of the Manifesto:

"The association will be organised as a federation of
projects, one representative of each project being a
member of the Governing Board.
Proposals for new projects can be submitted to the
Governing Board, whose main role will be their
evaluation with respect to the association's mission,
*while still encouraging the emergence of diversity, and
avoiding monoculture*. *Projects will autonomously
organize their governance rules*. Over time common
rules suggested by practice may be formally adopted... "

It is to point out that we should mainly vote regarding the usefulness 
of the project, but we cannot bind the vote to the realization of 
specific goals of AALOA.
In theory committers of open source projects are volunteers.
The project leader can report the advises he receive during the board 
meeting, but usually he has not the power to impose "external" decisions.
They must be discussed and accepted by the community working in the 
project according to their internal organization.

The coordination and  the mutual commitments we can reach in AALOA is 
another matter.
We can create ad hoc projects for shared objectives after discussing 
among interested members .
I see your request/recommendation in this way. For example,  we can 
start to discuss about AAL ontologies in a specific project promoted by 
EU projects like OASIS, UniversAAL, MonAMI  and incubated by AALOA...  
Alternatively also single organizations (e.g  the CNR and Trialog) could 
decide to dedicate resources to a specific project of mutual interest.

However the AALOA converging process to a common platform has not to 
influence the project proposals submitted to AALOA.
The first level of aggregation in AALOA is to allow visibility of all 
the AAL-related software.
In this way EU projects/ organizations /individuals may be interested to 
enter in AALOA.
The sharing of common objectives and planning is a second step.
I think it is the real challenge we have as community.
We need to be able to take commitments as a single entity, but also to 
be  free to propose independent solutions.
Working both as an Industrial Alliance that addresses specific targets, 
and as an Open Source Community that encourages the diversity.

We are a community of communities, the challenge is to find the right 
alchemy to work all together in harmony (it sounds good  at Christmas ;-) )

Said that, I took your message as excuse to talk about these issues.
I will happy (and curious) to discuss with you about the MonAMI 
interfaces ;-)

BRs,
Francesco

Il 21/12/2010 9.48, Bruno Jean-Bart ha scritto:
> Dear Francesco and all,
> My vote will be provided in a separate email but I include here 
> remarks on the Zigbee driver project.
>
> As already mentionned by Antonio (Trialog) and Roberto (Uni. 
> Zaragoza), we have developed in MonAMI two drivers for Zigbee Wireless 
> Sensors network, one by Unv Zaragoza, one by Trialog. The two 
> approaches use different Zigbee implementation (Ember for Uzaz) and 
> (TI for TRIALOG). The objectives of these two approaches were twofold :
>
> 1. to proof that the OSGi4AMI interfaces (Application Interfaces 
> representing sensors and actuators independantly from the type of the 
> network) can be implemented easily by two different teams.
>
> 2. to validate that the OSGi4AMI interfaces are comprehensively 
> defined to enable the interoperability of applications.
>
> The objective 1 was demonstrated.
> The objective 2 shows in some cases that the key issues is there : an 
> application interface such as OSGI4AMI is a must for interoperability 
> of applications but this is not sufficient: for interoperability, the 
> behaviour of devices themselves are generally not totally identical 
> and therefore the driver shall take into account these differences.
>
> In your project, I see some proposals to take into the above issues : 
> The use of the Zigbee Cluster Library will help for interoperability 
> at the level of Application Interfaces. However for AALOA, one of the 
> primary objectives is the definition of the Application interfaces of 
> the drivers. This interface cannot be the Zigbee-based on the ZCL, but 
> something more generic and I do not see that approach in your document.
>
> Therefore I would recommend the AALOA board to vote for the Zigbee 
> Project but a first task of this project would be to define the Device 
> API. In that goal, I recommend to use as input the OSGi4AMI proposal 
> (note that this name is misleading : the OSGI4AMI interfaces are not 
> depending on OSGi, nor Java. This is mainly an ontology of devices, 
> then mapped into Java interfaces).
>
> Bruno
> _________________________________________________________________________
> Bruno Jean-Bart
> Connectivity Products&  Services
> TRIALOG, 25 rue du General Foy, F-75008 Paris - France
> http://www.trialog.com
> Tel Direct : (33 1) 44 70 61 08, Fax :(33 1) 44 70 05 91
> _________________________________________________________________________
>
>
> Le 16/12/2010 15:07, Francesco Furfari a écrit :
>>  Dear Supporters,
>>
>> today I submitted a first project proposal to the Governing Board of 
>> AALOA.
>> Even if the project was already announced, it was a needed action in 
>> order to define the process for submitting a project proposal.
>> The governig board will decide whether the project proposal is 
>> alligned to the AALOA mission and consequently will allocate the 
>> requested resources.
>>
>> In particular this proposal is one of the outcomes of the PERSONA 
>> project (http://www.aal-persona.org/)  that finished with excellent 
>> evaluation few days ago.
>> As described in the Manifesto the leader proposing the project will 
>> be part of the AALOA Governing Board.
>>
>> We don't have a formal proposal template so far.
>> I thought to the following sections:
>> 1. Motivation for incubating the project
>> 2. Description of the codebase or the input material for the project
>> 3. Simple roadmap and invitation to contribute ( how the AALOA 
>> community could help)
>> 4. People involved (e.g. the list of initial committers in case of 
>> software projects)
>> 5. An optional expression of interest on the project incubation. ( 
>> list of people internal or external to AALOA )
>>
>> I  invite all of you to read the proposal for the ZigBee 4 OSGi project,
>> help to advertise the project (when accepted) and help to contribute 
>> to the further development and testing.
>>
>> Please,  if you have any doubt about  project proposal submission, 
>> don't hesitate to post your questions,
>> they will help to create a FAQ on the topic.
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> Francesco
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Supporters mailing list
>> Supporters at aaloa.org
>> http://aaloa.org/mailman/listinfo/supporters

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