An approach to domain-based scalable context management architecture in pervasive environments

In pervasive environments, context management systems are expected to administrate large volume of contextual information that is captured from spatial to nonspatial elements. Research in context-aware computing produced a number of middleware systems for context management to intermediate the communications between applications and context providers. In particular, in pervasive environments, the design of distributed storage, retrieval and propagation mechanisms of context information across domains is vital. In this paper, we propose a domain-based approach to address the requirements of scalable distributed context management, cross-domain efficient context information dissemination and domain-based privacy policy enforcement. We propose infinitum, a middleware architecture that incorporates the management and communication benefits of the Google Wave Federation Protocol, while also taking advantage of the semantic and inference benefits of ontology-based context models. This architecture establishes a robust cross-domain scalable context management and collaboration framework, which has been implemented and evaluated in a real-life application of “SMART University” to support virtual team collaboration.