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

Wed Dec 22 11:30:22 CET 2010

  Dear Kai,

this is a very good news.
We will be happy to contribute to the requirements,
as well as to work on the reference implementation when the 
specification will be ready.

Concerning Z-Wave I tried time ago to get their specification but it 
wasn't open.
Is there anybody in AALOA who have experience with such technology ?

Kind regards,
Francesco

Il 22/12/2010 11.07, Kai Hackbarth ha scritto:
> Dear Francesco, all,
>
> some of you may know that the OSGi Residential Expert Group started to 
> work on new requirements for REG specification release 5. We are also 
> planning to define standardized APIs for ZigBee and Z-Wave. The 
> general idea that Francesco introduced is inline with what are 
> planning to do at REG. We will start working on requirements documents 
> next year and you kindly invited to participate in this activities. I 
> keep you informed.
>
> Regards,
> Kai
>
>
> Am 21.12.2010 um 20:00 schrieb Francesco Furfari:
>
>> 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
>>
>> <ZigBee.JPG>_______________________________________________
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>
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> Kai Hackbarth · Evangelist & Chair OSGi Residential Expert Group
> ProSyst Software GmbH
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