An architecture for the design of platforms supporting responsive environments

Responsive environments are able to sense the environment and to respond to it and to the users that inhabit it. Those systems require both the integration of heterogeneous devices and an abstract representation of the environment to reason about interesting changes. The paper presents DEA (Domain Entities Access), an architecture that enables the realization of platforms supporting responsive environments in the interaction with instrumented physical environments through the observation and the control of meaningful domain entities, thus abstracting from any technological details. Platforms can be easily realized by plugging specific domain-dependant components in a framework that manages all the domain-independent aspects. Thus, the architecture results to be open with respect to both new devices and new typologies of domain entities. A prototypical implementation of the framework has been provided. Moreover, a specific platform has been realized to support an end-user application dealing with instrumented environments.