Supporting Context Awareness in Smart Environments: a Scalable Approach to Information Interoperability

A still open issue in pervasive systems is how to effectively sup-port the development and run-time execution of smart applica-tions in wide-scale and open deployment scenarios. That calls for i) easy and low-cost interoperability with legacy systems/services and ii) scalability in terms of both overhead and performance results for different classes of applications with different quality requirements. In this position paper, we report the research work we are doing within the JTI Artemis SOFIA project on the exploi-tation of context awareness for scalability in smart environments, where interoperability is achieved at the information level via semantic technologies. In particular, the paper shows how con-text-aware middleware facilities can help in dynamically deter-mining personalized views on a shared information space, imple-mented as coordinated repositories of Resource Description For-mat triples. The advantages are relevant in terms of usability (automatic discarding of unsuitable resource/service components) and overhead reduction (limitation of quality monitoring space).