Supporting knowledge management in context-aware and pervasive environments using event-based coordination

Our paper describes a technical framework that aims at supporting knowledge management in distributed environments. The main intention is to provide adaptive decision support in the field and assist with the dissemination of relevant information and knowledge among geographically dispersed user groups. The key technical contribution is the integration of the extended tuple space concept to adapt, co-ordinate and control a set of ordered events (e.g. workflow processes) as well as applications and devices in mobile settings, in combination with a content-based, message-oriented communication infrastructure. The proposed framework also facilitates communication among distributed and heterogeneous applications and allows for optimising access to information. Finally, it can be used to support awareness and personalization. For showing its practical relevance, we have applied it to maintenance scenarios in the context of the highly distributed network of monitoring stations feeding into the IMS operated by CTBTO PrepCom in Vienna.