Enabling non-programmers to develop smart environment applications

Smart environments are small worlds where various interconnected devices are continuously working to make inhabitants´ lives more comfortable. Given the variety of different views on what constitutes “more comfortable” and the variety of situations people experience, we believe that the inhabitants of a smart environment must be empowered to easily modify software applications running in it and to mash-up new applications when needed. The following properties are desired: a high level of abstraction in application design, on-the-fly development, flexibility with respect to adding new devices and software components, combination of task-based and opportunistic design processes, and an ability to define policies to restrict users from designing unsafe applications. In this paper, we present a novel framework for semantic software metadata and describe how utilizing it in our application development tool, Smart Modeller, enables non-programmer composition of smart environment applications.