This website is the home of the Activity-Based Computing Project (ABC) at the IT University of Copenhagen. We, and others, are using the term activity-based computing to denote a new paradigm for computing, which is more suited for ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Activity-based computing has emerged as a response to the traditional application- and file-centered computing paradigm, which is oblivious to a notion of a user task spanning heterogeneous devices, multiple applications, services, and information sources.
What is Activity-Based Computing? Well, our work on ABC is motivated in creating pervasive computing support for hospitals (see e.g. our original concept videos), but has much wider applications than this medical domain. We have created the ABC Framework, which can be downloaded and used or you can start to program ABC-aware applications in the framework. The ABC Framework has emerged over a period of 3-4 years and has been documented in various publications.
The current version 4 of the ABC Framework is built upon a highly distributed architecture, which is based on a client-server architecture, and utilize a special purpose ABC protocol (ABCP), which is language and operating system independent. Version 4 of the framework has a server implemented in Java and the client implemented on the .NET platform. The .NET client and user interface is tightly integrated with the Windows XP operating system. We have, for example, replaced the Windows Taskbar with an Activity Bar. Finally, the ABC Framework has built-in support for collaboration as part of the 'operating system'.
We are now working on version 5 of the ABC infrastructure. This is work in progress, and more on this will follow.
