AmbientDB: P2P data management middleware for ambient intelligence

The future generation of consumer electronics devices is envisioned to provide automatic cooperation between devices and run applications that are sensitive to people´s likings, personalized to their requirements, anticipatory of their behavior and responsive to their presence. We see this ´ambient intelligence´ as a key feature of future pervasive computing. We focus here on one of the challenges in realizing this vision: information management. This entails integrating, querying, synchronizing and evolving structured data, on a heterogeneous and ad-hoc collection of (mobile) devices. Rather than hard-coding data management functionality in each individual application, we argue for adding high-level data management functionalities to the distributed middleware layer. Our ambientDB P2P database management system addresses this by providing a global database abstraction over an ad-hoc network of heterogeneous peers.