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concept of task patterns to the field of smart
environments. We started by answering the
question: Why do we have to model? Afterwards,
we highlighted the role that patterns can play in
order to make this modeling process faster, of
better performance and less-error prone.
Afterwards, we made a distinction between the
forcing and the flexible contexts and we extended
the already known definition of task patterns by
integrating the forcing context which is composed
out of the task’s related preconditions and effects.
We argued that taking this concept of context into
account enables to facilitate the building process of
the other models and additionally makes it feasible
to integrate the solution not only as a simple task
fragment, but as a building block where all the
mandatory related environmental constraints are
expressed. We provided a detailed description of
the structure of our twenty patterns filling a task
pattern library addressing the domain of smart
meeting rooms. Also, the level of flexibility
offered by the patterns was discussed and we
elaborated the idea of taking impaired users into
account in order to give the developer the
opportunity to design universally accessible
applications while being assisted by those patterns.
Moreover, one example of those patterns was
presented in full details and finally we discussed an
application example where a simple scenario was
presented and we illustrated the instantiation of
this pattern and its’ usage to assist the developer
while building the task models to be assigned to
the included roles. Now, we are developing a
pattern tool that we believe can allow the usage of
our patterns in an easier and seamless way. As for
our approach we investigated CTML as a suitable
language for the domain of smart environments,
we are extending the CTML editor which provides
an Eclipse-based IDE to build task models by our
task pattern application tool. We believe that this
tool can offer real assistance to the developer while
developing applications in the context of smart
environments.
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