Architecture for management and fusion of context information

Information in a context-aware system has diverse natures. Raw data coming from sensors are aggregated and filtered to create more abstract information, which can be processed by context-aware application components to decide what actions should be performed. This process involves several activities: finding the available sources of information and their types, gathering the data from these sources, facilitating the fusion (aggregation and interpretation) of the different pieces of data, and updating the representation of the context to be used by applications. The reverse path also appears in context-aware systems, from changes in the context representation to trigger actions in certain actuators. FAERIE (Framework for AmI: Extensible Resources for Intelligent Environments) is a framework that facilitates management and fusion of context information at different levels. It is implemented as a distributed blackboard model. Each node of the system has a private blackboard to manage pieces of information that can be accessed by observer components, either locally or remotely (from other nodes) in a transparent way. The use of the framework is illustrated with a case study of an application for guiding people to meetings in a university building.