Architecting an Event-based Pervasive Sensing Environment in the Hospital

Radio frequency identification (RFID) sensor networks are increasingly being applied to the hospital environment. Capture of fine grained operational data in this environment can promote meaningful process reengineering with the objective of improving efficiencies in operational aspects. The RFID sensor nodes generate large amounts of fine grained real time data, related to resources and processes within the hospital environment. Understanding and managing these data in the context of the enterprise applications pose challenges for the middleware which has to connect sensor networks with enterprise applications. In this paper, we propose an architectural solution based on the notion of an event. The primary characteristics of an event are discussed and a three layered event representation model is developed to map raw sensory information to semantic events. A generalized event ontology language is proposed