Abstract
Nowadays, ubiquitous computing has radically changed the way users access and interact with services and contents on the Internet: novel smart mobile devices and broadband wireless communication channels allow users to seamlessly access them anytime and anywhere. Middleware infrastructures to support ubiquitous computing need to support an extremely dynamic and ever-changing scenario, where novel contents/services, devices, formats, and media channels become available. Service-oriented architectures and service composition techniques have proven to be the key in designing flexible and extensible platforms able to reliably support ubiquitous computing. However, current trends in service composition for ubiquitous computing tend to be either too formal and therefore poorly usable by average final users, or too vertical and poorly flexible and extensible. This paper proposes a novel service composition middleware for ubiquitous computing that relies on a translucent composition model to achieve a flexible, extensible, highly-available, but also easily understandable and usable platform. The proposed system has been widely tested, benchmarked, and deployed on a number of different and heterogeneous ubiquitous scenarios.