On the integration of context-based heterogeneous middleware for ubiquitous computing

Abstract

The use of context provision middleware is a promising approach for dealing with the low-level functions involved in handling contextual events when building ubiquitous applications. Several middleware platforms are currently available that provide support for context handling, each one adopting different models for interacting with applications and representing contextual data, and aiming at handling different types of context. There are ubiquitous applications that need dealing with a high degree of heterogeneous context sources and detection of complex event patterns thus requiring support of different and often noninteroperable middleware platforms. For this kind of application, developers must handle the platform heterogeneity, thus increasing the complexity of the application code. To address this issue, we propose OpenCOPI (Open COntext Platform Integration), a context platform that integrates several context provision middleware and provides common services for handling the composition of contextual events in order to offer a unified context platform. This paper introduces OpenCOPI and details its composition event service, CES, showing the integrating of two context middleware. The paper also describes a case study, based on a Meeting Detection System, to illustrate the use of CES.