ContextNet Middleware

Project ContextNet aims at provisioning context services for wide- and large-scale pervasive collaborative applications such as on-line monitoring or coordination of mobile entities' activities, and information sharing through social networks. These entities may be users of portable devices, such as smartphones, vehicles, or autonomic mobile robots. In the ContextNet project, communication and context distribution capabilities are implemented in the Scalable Data Distribution Layer (SDDL), while other services and extensions are built as software modules on top of this distribution layer. Together, these software modules form the ContextNet middleware. In this wiki, you will find information on how to download and use the ContextNet middleware.

Applications such as vehicle fleet monitoring and dispatch systems, logistics, emergency response coordination, or mobile workforce management, employ mobile networks as means of enabling communication, data sharing, and coordination among a possibly very large set of mobile nodes – that be vehicles, people or event mobile robots and UAVs. The majority of those applications thus requires the capacity of handling real-time dissemination of context/ location information, group communication and management for thousands of mobile nodes, adaptability in very dynamic scenarios, where mobile nodes experience intermittent connectivity, or change of their IP address, and dynamic grouping of nodes according to their current location or any other mobile context information.

A common characteristics of all such applications is the fact that the mobile nodes periodically produce some data about them (e.g. probing sensors), which we call context information, like for example, their position, speed or other data, and publish this data to other nodes – either stationary or mobile, for being processed or visualized in almost real-time. Hence, it is assumed also that each mobile node has some wireless interface and is capable of communicating with other stationary machines, simply through the IP protocol. For all these applications, the main requirement is that, if the mobile node is connected and is producing its context data, this context update should be delivered to all the other interested nodes almost instantaneously.

Project ContextNet builds on previous experiences and tools developed in Project Mobilis. It represents a general and long-term research initiative with several concrete projects as its spin-off activities.

• Enable scalable distribution of context information among hundreds of thousands of context-producing and context-consuming entities (user, vehicles, smart objects);
• Devise reasoning techniques that are inherently distributed and capable of detecting application relevant patterns of global context situations;
• Use semantic Web to combine several types of context information (computing, physical, time, user context) and integrate them with social networks to leverage the communication and coordination capabilities of mobile users and/or vehicles.

• OMG Data Distribution Service For Real-Time Systems: Peer2Peer, data-centric publish-subscribe middleware for real-time data distribution, with a rich set of Quality of Service (QoS) parameters.
• Complex Event Processing (CEP): Technology for real-time processing of event flows, detection of relationships such as event temporality, causality, dependency, and composition.
• Semantic Web Standards (RDF, OWL, Linked Data, RIF): Interoperable modeling and reasoning support with standard vocabularies, e.g. FOAF, GeoNames, Delivery Context, etc. for representing entities, their context, and inference rules.