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

Although several context-aware systems have been devel- oped 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 pro jects work on adequate so- lutions for supporting context-awareness. It seems that the ma jor dif- ficulties have to do with a hurdle called context modeling and its ex- tensibility 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 pro ject 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 interoper- ability that makes use of ontological technologies and defines appropriate protocols along with an upper ontology for sharing context. A set of stan- dard platform components together with a general conceptual solution for binding ultra-thin nodes top off the presented approach.