Distributed context provisioning and reaction middleware

The user applications implemented within a pervasive environment need to observe and adapt themselves to the environment in order to gain an efficient usage of the available information. This paper presents a new architectural approach in building a distributed context-aware acquisition middleware which supports application adaptation to the environment changes. The architecture is based on the possibility to integrate different context providers in a way that is transparent for the end-user. The complexity of the context providers is hidden to the client application. The middleware provides both a transparent mechanism which is used to monitor the environment changes and a simple query language to interrogate the system for given target context values. Comparing our proposed middleware against the requirements of a pervasive context-aware application, it proves to be a feasible solution for building context-aware pervasive applications.