Active architecture for pervasive contextual services

Pervasive services may be defined as services that are available to any client (anytime, anywhere). Here we focus on the software and network infrastructure required to support pervasive contextual services operating over a wide area. One of the key requirements is a matching service capable of assimilating and filtering information from various sources and determining matches relevant to those services. We consider some of the challenges in engineering a globally distributed matching service that is scalable, manageable, and able to evolve incrementally as usage patterns, data formats, services, network topologies and deployment technologies change. We outline an approach based on the use of a peer-to-peer architecture to distribute user events and data, and to support the deployment and evolution of the infrastructure itself

Active architecture for pervasive contextual services

International Workshop on Middleware for Pervasive and Ad-hoc Computing MPAC 2003), ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Middleware Conference (Middleware 2003), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil This work was supported by the FP5 Gloss project IST2000-26070, with partners at Trinity College Dublin and Université Joseph Fourier, and by EPSRC grants GR/M78403/GR/M76225, Supporting Internet Computation in Arbitrary Geographical Locations, and GR/R45154, Bulk Storage of XML Documents.Pervasive services may be defined as services that are available "to any client (anytime, anywhere)". Here we focus on the software and network infrastructure required to support pervasive contextual services operating over a wide area. One of the key requirements is a matching service capable of as-similating and filtering information from various sources and determining matches relevant to those services. We consider some of the challenges in engineering a globally distributed matching service that is scalable, manageable, and able to evolve incrementally as usage patterns, data formats, services, network topologies and deployment technologies change. We outline an approach based on the use of a peer-to-peer architecture to distribute user events and data, and to support the deployment and evolution of the infrastructure itself.Peer reviewe

Designing interoperable museum information systems

Museum collections are characterized by heterogeneity, since they usually host a plethora of objects of categories, while each of them requires different description policies and metadata standards. Moreover the museum records, which keep the history and evolution of the hosted collections, request proactive curation in order to preserve this rich and diverse information. In this paper, the architecture of an innovative museum information system, as well as its implementation details is presented. In particular the requirements and the system architecture are presented along with the problems that were encountered. The main directions of the system design are (a) to increase interoperability levels and therefore assist proactive curation and (b) to enhance navigation by the usage of handheld devices. The first direction is satisfied by the design of a rich metadata schema based on the CIDOC/CRM standard. The second direction is fulfilled by the implementation of a module, which integrates the museum database with a subsystem appropriate to support user navigation into the museum floors and rooms. The module is expressed as a navigation functionality, which is accessed through handheld devices and peripherals, such as PDAs and RFID tags. The proposed system is functional and operates into the Solomos Museum, situated in Zakynthos island, Greece

Technical considerations towards mobile user QoE enhancement via Cloud interaction

This paper discusses technical considerations of a Cloud infrastructure which interacts with mobile devices in order to migrate part of the computational overhead from the mobile device to the Cloud. The aim of the interaction between the mobile device and the Cloud is the enhancement of parameters that affect the Quality of Experience (QoE) of the mobile end user through the offloading of computational aspects of demanding applications. This paper shows that mobile user’s QoE can be potentially enhanced by offloading computational tasks to the Cloud which incorporates a predictive context-aware mechanism to schedule delivery of content to the mobile end-user using a low-cost interaction model between the Cloud and the mobile user. With respect to the proposed enhancements, both the technical considerations of the cloud infrastructure are examined, as well as the interaction between the mobile device and the Cloud