SIMS aims to get all computers instantly compatible

It follows work at the EU-funded SIMS (Semantic Interfaces for Mobile Services) group, and SIMS project coordinator Richard Sanders says the result is that devices such as smart phones, PDAs and computers will be able to interact seamlessly, update themselves and allow users to implement new services out of the box. “If you have communicating software and the communication is important, you want to make sure it works when it interacts with other software,” he says. “SIMS provides the tools to check those scenarios and actually guarantees compatibility.” Sanders says the researchers based their approach on factors they felt were poorly understood. Unlike a telephone call, he explains, where one device attempts to initiate a particular kind of connection with another, most computing services now involve many loosely interconnected software components, running on a variety of devices, initiating complex sequences of contacts with different messaging modes. One result of their back-to-basics approach is that the development of a new service starts with a model of what that service should accomplish, rather than with computer code. “The model uses semantic interfaces to specify what goals need to be realised and how the components need to behave and interact to bring that about. Semantic interfaces detail what kinds of connections, exchanges and results are meaningful,” says Saunders. “We can validate that nothing goes bad; that you don’t send me a message that I won’t understand,” he adds. Meaning that developers can create computer code to run devices directly from validated models, so that code is always guaranteed to work with all the components of the system. “The greatest potential lies in the way SIMS can support a marketplace with lots of people specifying services and lots of companies making components that implement these services,” says Sanders. “This marketplace would support the spreading of software in a much more efficient way than you currently see, and without quality and compatibility problems.”