Relation-Centric Development of Spatially-Aware Applications

With an increasing density of computationally enhanced objects that are distributed in physical space, it becomes important that they operate autonomously and allow for a more implicit interaction with humans. Spatial properties and relations are important in this regard, as an awareness about such context information builds up the basis for automatically adapting to spatial changes in the environment. In this paper, we propose a relation-centric approach for the development of spatially-aware applications for autonomous embedded systems, which builds upon qualitative abstractions of spatial relations and the rule-based inference of conclusions from them. We implemented a service-oriented software framework therefore and demonstrate our approach by means of two application scenarios.