MUMMY - The System

2. System Components ___

The MUMMY system is a generic platform to support knowledge acquisition and retrieval in mobile business processes. It consists of the following different components and distinct derivates:

2.1 MUMMY Core

The system core (MUMMY Core) integrates the Context Module, the Meta Data Engine, the Core Engine and a simple GUI. It provides the basic MUMMY specific capabilities:

• context management and

• time/task/location/user-awareness as the starting point for
• situational assistance,

• supports multimodal / multimedia data acquisition (as text, sketches, voice and images),

• meta data handling to organise this information in its particular context,
• keeps the related data models and finally

• is going to provide some content adaptation mechanism to support
mobile information access and search.

The MUMMY Core is not a domain specific application but enables the generation of applications by collaboration with external modules (like Grenoble, SVG-Collaboration and Hypervideo) and the integration of application specific user interfaces and related workflow / business logic via the plug-in container.

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2.2 MUMMY Pilot Application

The Pilot Application uses the presented approach in 1.2.1 to shape the main (and field-tested) application of the MUMMY project, which is dedicated to support site inspection personnel in the area of facility management and technical services. Therefore it adds domain and end-user specific interfaces and functionalities. These are:

• The forms application to support the workflow and particular business processes of the end-user partners. These formalise for instance the reporting of potential hazardous material during site inspections (business process: hazardous material building inventory).

• It provides functionality to handle information by its relevance to locations and provides rough navigation help for on-site orientation of workers. The main aspect of this extension is a hierarchical visualisation of sites to be inspected in a tree-view (Building / Floor / Room) and in a map-view (using the corresponding hierarchy of maps). Nodes of the hierarchy and marks within maps can be used as anchors for annotating and retrieval of annotations.

• To pre- and post-process in particular the location-dependent and inter-related multimedia information, Grenoble shall be later an integral part of the Pilot Application (see section 1.2.5).

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2.3 Grenoble

Grenoble will support in particular pre- and post-processing of information needed or collected on-site during e.g. a site inspection.
For pre-processing purposes it facilitates the inter-relation of locations with tasks and media. These tasks and media will then be made available pro-actively on-site under the defined activation conditions, such as user’s arrival at a certain spot.

In the post-processing phase, visualisation of interrelations is provided for both previously authored and mobile generated info items. The user is enabled to review consistency and completeness of “the information in context” and may alter and correct relations and data elements. Furthermore Grenoble will provide a basic report-generator, which is going to be in particular tuned to meet the needs of the business process of hazardous material inventory.

The main visualisation methods and approaches to manipulate the interrelated data-space are not domain specific. In this regard Grenoble maybe used as an external module extending the usability of the mummy Core. However, as Grenoble is in particular designed for interaction with the mummy data models it can not be used completely stand-alone as the SVG and Hypervideo modules.

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2.4 Problem Tracking

The Problem Tracking System facilitates the day-to-day operational tasks of Field Technicians in the technical service (TS) domain. It implements the current real-life technical service procedures employed in INTRACOM’s TS department. Currently it operates as a standalone application but it can be integrated with the MUMMY Core and use MUMMY Core functionality. Main functionalities of this application are:

• Transparent information exchange between the TS “headquarters” and the Field Technicians based on bi-directional synchronization of the mobile and home data repositories. Synchronization can be performed on-user-demand and is optimized for reduced bit-rate data services (like GSM/GPRS)

• Representation of context information {user + time +task (product serviced) / location (where available)} within its local database. This information can be used for automatic creation of context awareness and situation assistance information from the MUMMY core without any need for pre-processing.

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2.5 SVG-Collaboration

The SVG-Collaboration module provides a system for easy and fast collaborative annotation of mainly 2D (SVG) plans on pocket-sized devices. It can be used as a stand-alone application or integrated with the MUMMY Core and the MUMMY Core Application.
Main functionality of this module is task collaboration and live sharing of annotations based on mobile maps for easier decision making and storing of acquired knowledge in mobile environment on-site. The system shall provide on-line data access to corporate database while using a variety of mobile devices like PDAs, notebooks and smart phones.

Due to the totally different context of use (e.g. small device, non-comfortable environment, different input/output possibilities, short time to decision making, often task switching) adaptation of data for “best presentation” is crucial. The module provides (together with the MUMMY Core) adaptation functionality and still displays what and how was adapted in order to enable the user correct interpretation. Moreover, contextual information is utilised to automatically generate semantic descriptions and to associate context objects with the information acquired within the annotation process. This helps to achieve more efficient searching for information, based on context sensitive retrieval concept.

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2.6 Hypervideo

Like SVG-Collaboration, the Hypervideo module can be used either as stand-alone application, or as an integrated part together with the MUMMY Core and the MUMMY Core Application. Hypervideo provides a complete set of functions to use and author interactive video sequences and to collaboratively communicate with or about these.

Thereby, Hypervideo combines details in a video sequence with other documents, which can be any form of multimedia (images, audio, video, text). These links to other media appear as visible and “clickable” regions within the authored video. Video annotation may emphasise specific parts of the video itself or the video maybe used to organise and locate a set of media material along a story line or a spatial path (e.g. the path of a site inspection). The latter case is integrated with the MUMMY Core by interfacing the time/task/location/user-related management of inter-related information parts in context.

Finally, the hypervideo users can annotate video content during a presentation by combining certain details in the video sequences with own additional information in order to share their knowledge with others in the community. This collaborative use of hypervideo can be considered as a dynamic document, which can be modified and extended by conversations and discussions regarding group activities.

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