A FLEXIBLE MIDDLEWARE COMPONENT FOR CONTEXT AWARE APPLICATIONS

The ever-growing complexity of pervasive and Internet of Things enabled environments raises great challenges to context-aware pervasive application development. In particular, context representation and reasoning methods, as well as middleware and supporting infrastructures for context sensitive application engineering, must have a high level of flexibility in order to cope with the increasing dynamicity and heterogeneity of pervasive scenarios. This paper presents a solution devised to provide the foundations for the development of context-adaptive applications with diverse requirements. The Context Awareness component consists of an extensible and configurable framework that integrates a semantic reasoning module and multiple processing agents providing specialized / optimized processing capabilities. Finally, a case study shows how the adopted solution allows tackling the complexity of context-aware applications development.