Integration of Heterogeneous Context Resources in Ubiquitous Environments

Ubiquitous environments provide families of context-aware applications that are capable of exploiting the user mobility as well as the device variability. Typically, these applications retrieve context information from local and remote providers and react accordingly to the detected variations. However, this must be done by considering the heterogeneity of devices and protocols found in ubiquitous environments. Unfortunately, although the context integration represents a keystone of context-aware systems, existing approaches in the literature fail to integrate the diversity of context sources in a standard and flexible way. Therefore, in this paper, we overcome this challenge by introducing resource-oriented bindings into the SCA (Service Component Architecture) model. This new kind of bindings follows the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) principles and leverages the provision of context as RESTful resources. A smart home scenario that highlights challenges in terms of integration in ubiquitous environments motivates the use of our approach.