Hewlett-Packard Company announces the launch of an Open Source project called “CoolBase” today at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in San Diego. CoolBase is a group of software and hardware technologies that together form a platform on which mobile e-services for embedded personal systems can be implemented as part of HP Lab's… pervasive computing initiative known as “Cooltown”.

What's Cooltown?

For several years, HP Labs has been researching the idea of an “intersection of nomadicity, appliances, networking, and the web.” That effort, which evolved into Cooltown, “sees everything, including people, places, and things, as first class citizens of the connected world, wired and wireless.”

According to HP Labs' vision of a Cooltown future, everybody and everything will carry some sort of presence ID which will communicate with its environment. “Even the cat [will be] linked to the environment via a location identifier that is emitted by a beacon embedded in her collar and acquired by the space manager.”

As an example, URLs might be gathered from beacons located throughout museums or shopping centers by pressing a few buttons on a tiny wireless device that hangs on a keychain. Later, those URLs could be transferred to a home computer for accessing information on the web, or they might be transmitted directly (via Infrared) to printers or displays in public locations using a beaming technology HP calls “e-squirt.” Song IDs might be collected when music is heard over a sound system, allowing the listener to later look up the artist and title over the Internet and, potentially, purchase and download the title for adding to a personal music collection on a web-enabled stereo system.

What's CoolBase?

HP is demonstrating CoolBase and some sample Cooltown applications at the O'Reilly Open Source convention in San Diego, CA this week.

In addition, HP is releasing several key CoolBase technologies to the Open Source community today. An associated HP press release describes the released components as comprising several sub-projects which include: software for enabling smart, connected web devices; software for representing people, places and things and their contextual relationship; supporting hardware and software elements; and sample applications that illustrate the use of these various elements.

Cooltown director Gene Becker describes the essence of Cooltown as “bridging the physical and the virtual world. “With today's launch of CoolBase, HP moves forward on making its vision for connecting people, places, and things a reality,” he adds. According to Becker, the CoolBase technologies that are being opened up today to the Open Source community will “let people create their own Cooltown experiences.”

Through placing these technologies in the public trust, Becker hopes to see CoolBase begin to “take hold with researchers and early adopters that work with embedded devices, mobile systems, and context-aware services.”

Some specifics

Here are brief descriptions (from HP's Cooltown website) of the specific CoolBase components HP is opening up to the public this week . . .

• CoolBase Appliance Server — the CoolBase Appliance Server and coolkit implement an object-oriented web application server designed specifically for embedded systems. With this software and an IP network connection, an embedded system can serve dynamic web pages, host and participate in web services, and in general interact with and be invoked by other HTTP-enabled components.

• Esquirt — The Esquirt project provides an API and implementations for a new device interaction model — by-reference invocation with reflected user interface. Simply stated, Esquirt enables a personal device like a mobile phone or PDA to become a universal remote control for e-services delivered through other web devices.

• Web Presence Manager (WPM) — The WPM enables creation of web service representations for people, places and things. WPM implements a directory of relationships, a dynamic parser, and a template-based engine to present views of an entity (e.g., a place) and its contextual relationships (e.g., the people, things and services in or related to the place).

• Beacons — Cooltown beacons are small hardware devices whose function is to broadcast references (e.g., URLs) wirelessly in specific locations. For example, a beacon in a room might broadcast the URL for the room's web presence; a beacon next to a painting might broadcast the URL for the museum's web pages describing the provenance of that artwork. Specs, board layout, and firmware are provided for a battery-powered beacon that transmits using infrared (IR-Ultra). The cooltown Esquirt software implements the receiving function for beacons.

• Taggy — the Cooltown Taggy is a tiny personal device (small enough to hang like a fob on a key chain) which simply acquires beacons and squirts them back out. The UI consists of a few buttons and LEDs. It serves as an illustration of an extremely simple client that can be useful in a cooltown application environment.

• Baseboard — Baseboard is a small-footprint single board computer which implements a reference platform for web appliances; the software configuration is built on version 2.4 of Linux. This device can be used to prototype Cooltown web appliances.

• Secure Web Tunnel (SWT) — SWT is a service which supports transparent secure access to web resources that exist behind a firewall. There is a service component which sits on the firewall and a client component that runs on each remote client device. Due to license restrictions on the required SSL component, SWT is delivered as non-functional code requiring the integration of a licensed SSL component.

• Sample applications — an initial sample application, the Internet Radio, is provided as an illustration of how to create a prototype web appliance. The radio uses the Spiderman HW/SW platform, the HP Chai server stack, and Esquirt to implement an interesting (and fun) device that can be controlled from a web browser or from a PDA.

With the exception of the SSL component required to implement the SWT, HP has released the above-listed software components under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The hardware designs for the sample Beacon and Taggy designs are being placed in the public domain. Although other embedded computers can be used, the CoolBase reference design is based on a commercially available EBX form-factor single board computer called the “Neptune” which is manufactured by Adastra Systems.

 
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