INCA: A Software Infrastructure to Facilitate the Construction and Evolution of Ubiquitous Capture & Access Applications

The experience of building a number of capture and access applications is presented, sharing insights on the successes and difficulties encountered that inform the design of the INCA toolkit (Infrastructure for Capture and Access), which supports the construction of applications in this class.

Abstract

People’s daily lives provide them with memories and records that they often want to review later. They must expend time and effort to record these experiences manually for future retrieval. To address this issue, applications that automatically capture details of a live experience and provide future access to that experience have become an increasingly common theme of research in ubiquitous computing. In this paper, we present our experience building a number of capture and access applications, sharing insights on the successes and difficulties we encountered. These lessons inform the design of the INCA toolkit (Infrastructure for Capture and Access), which supports the construction of applications in this class. We will demonstrate how INCA facilitates the rapid prototyping and simplified evolution of increasingly complex capture and access applications.