The Grapevine Context Processor: Application Support for Efficient Context Sharing

Today´s ubiquitous wireless networks enable easy access to information on the web. However, when applications need access to highly transient and hyper-localized information, web access is not as efficient as sharing directly with colocated devices. This context information can be easily collected by commodity mobile devices and shared via device-to-device interactions. Open challenges remain in making this exchange as efficient and effective as possible. In this paper, we propose the Grapevine Context Processor (GCP), which provides a framework and a set of APIs for representing and sharing context information. GCP is built on the Grapevine context sharing framework, which is underpinned by a suite of novel space-efficient context representing data structures. GCP, as a context processing framework, enables application developers to easily specify context types of interest and provide relevant semantic filters for those types, we design a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow easy access to and control over the data structures.