The PERSONA framework for supporting context-awareness in open distributed systems

Although several context-aware systems have been developed within the past 15 years that use contextual info captured from the physical environment in combination with system usage context and personalization data, it seems that a breakthrough has not been achieved yet, because still more and more research projects work on adequate solutions for supporting context-awareness. It seems that the major difficulties have to do with a hurdle called context modeling and its extensibility as well as the open nature of such systems that must allow for dynamic pluggability of components distributed over several physical nodes. This paper presents the related work results from the EU project PERSONA that feature remarkable conceptual solutions for the above issues. It consists of a middleware solution for open distributed systems dealing with seamless connectivity and adequate support for interoperability that makes use of ontological technologies and defines appropriate protocols along with an upper ontology for sharing context. A set of standard platform components together with a general conceptual solution for binding ultra-thin nodes top off the presented approach.