INFEX

Abstract

In our daily lives we are witnessing a proliferation of digital devices including tablets, smartphones, digital cameras or wearable appliances. A major effort has been made to enable these devices to exchange information in intelligent spaces and collaborative settings. However, the arising technical challenges often manifest themselves to end users as limitations, inconsistencies or added complexity. A wide range of existing and emerging devices cannot be used with existing solutions for cross-device information exchange due to restrictions in terms of the supported communication protocols, hardware or media types. We present INFEX, a general and extensible framework for cross-device information exploration and exchange. While existing solutions often support a restricted set of devices and networking protocols, our unifying and extensible INFEX framework enables information exchange and exploration across arbitrary devices and also supports devices that cannot run custom software or do not offer their own I/O modalities. The plug-in based INFEX architecture allows developers to provide custom but consistent user interfaces for information exchange and exploration across a heterogeneous set of devices.