Activity Context Aware Digital Workspaces and Consumer Playspaces: Manifesto and Architecture

We define and propose a manifesto and an architecture for smart digital workspaces and consumer playspaces, that “know” what the user is doing (activity structure, context, goals), how are they doing it (methods), what resources are they using (allocation and discovery), when (time) and where (location, application, device) are they doing it, who are they (profile, history), what is their role (responsibility, security, privacy) and who are their collaborators (social network), all the while observing, recording this context of work and play (institutional and social tribal knowledge). These smart workspaces and playspaces to be developed in the next five years, will let the users seamlessly move between applications and devices without having to remember or copy what they did earlier (activity context transfer and exchange), proactively show them steps others took in meaningfully similar situations before (semantic task reasoning), quickly find and show them directly related information and present answers to questions based on what they mean (proactive semantic extraction and search), in the context they need it, with access to provenance, quality and derivation of information, connect them to insights of experts within the organization and beyond, helping them reason and decide faster, with greater confidence, within a framework for managing, semantically dividing, tracking and enabling distributed work. We report two examples of the application of this architecture: a patient care system in a hospital and an assisted living system.