Framework Evaluation

Abstract

After having described the Zones-of-Influence Framework in its current prototypical stage, and shown with performance tests that it runs stable and how it behaves under extreme conditions, this chapter presents a qualitative evaluation of the overall framework by means of several application scenarios. They have been selected to investigate different aspects of the current implementation, and therewith prove the feasibility and quality of the framework and its underlying concepts for spatial awareness. The evaluation of prototypes with different scenarios is a common methodology in the field of pervasive computing [Sch02], and it has been used for many of the projects presented in Section 2.6.1; examples are the projects Mediacup [BGS01], Easy Living [BMK⁺00], Cooperative Artefacts [SGKK04] and the ParcTab system [WSA⁺95]. First, in Section 7.1, a design process for the development of spatially aware applications is proposed, which is based on quantitative and qualitative abstractions of spatial context information. Afterwards, Section 7.2 presents application scenarios which have been developed therewith, provides implementation details and discusses evaluation criteria as well as our subjective experiences with regard to using the Zones-of-Influence Framework for each of them. Section 7.3 finally compares the application scenarios with respect to several aspects including the utilized Zones-of-Influence and qualitative spatial relations, the incorporated physical sensors and actuators as well as the applied rule-based inference techniques for achieving spatial awareness, and concludes with a comprehensive discussion on the realized implementations and the feasibility and quality of the awareness concepts developed within the present thesis.