Ubiquitous computing has been a vision for decades but yet come to pass. This paper investigates the lack of adoption of ubiquitous computing technologies through a survey on 35 top tier research projects in this field. We find five major resistances in the adoption process and propose an open ubiquitous environment initiative to solve this problem. We have developed OUCE, an Internet-scale context service provisioning platform to support an open ubiquitous environment. Our evaluation shows the performance of OUCE exceeds existing specialized ubiquitous computing middleware infrastructures.

Web services have been widely used to support context-aware applications for context information retrieval in a ubiquitous environment. However, most of the existing research efforts in this field only focus on using SOAP web service as an enabling technology. In this paper, we compare REST and SOAP web services for supporting ubiquitous environments. We describe our approaches to deploy an open ubiquitous computing environment using REST style services along with semantic web and mobile technologies. We also discuss an example context-aware application developed for the environment and show how REST style services can contribute in moving ubiquitous computing technologies into the real world.