From unified messaging towards I-centric services for the virtual home environment

This paper introduces user-centric services as an approach to integrating different services, and it illustrates how this approach can be applied to the virtual home environment. The services we propose act on behalf of a single user's demands and the system we built includes profiling and self-adaption to 'contexts' and 'situations'. We use the term 'I-centric' where 'I' means I (me, myself, and I) or individual and where 'centric' means to adapt to every 'I' requirement in the current environmental situation. The prototype implementation of the system is derived from numerous development projects in the areas of: unified messaging systems, object and person tracking, mobile guides, smart homes, and car networks that have been implemented by our group in cooperation with GMD FOKUS, IKV++, IVISTAR AG, and several other industrial partners.