Distributed and Cooperative Service Platform "UKARI-Kernel"Plan for networked Appliances

In recent years, networked appliances, which are the home appliances with a networking function, have been opening a new gate for home ubiquitous environments and services implemented on them. Although it is important to regulate data formats, protocols and so for interoperability, the service scenarios portrayed by just connecting stand-alone appliances are limited. For users, it would be useful to construct their own service dynamically by combining the individual functions in the appliances. The UKARI-Core, a communication middleware platform for networked appliances, has been developed to make the flexible and dynamical service construction based on the individual functions a reality. This paper describes a plan of extension of the UKARI-Core by adding XML descriptions for sensor functions, a service scenario description framework and a user accessibility control mechanism to the functions. The extended middleware platform is called the UKARI-Kernel.