Network

Again, it’s about context awareness. It is one of the enabler for Mobile 2.0, remember? :). A mass-market of users with differentiated preferences and heterogeneous wireless terminals is going to access services dynamically in next generation mobile systems. There is the need for novel solutions for user-centric service discovery that provide users with a personalised view of only the services of their potential interest based on user context, e.g., user preferences, access device capabilities, and environment conditions.

I found a site discussing the initiative to the context awareness by creating a middleware. The name is MIDAS: middleware for intelligent discovery of context-aware services. MIDAS exemplifies how to exploit context awareness based on user/device/service profile metadata and semantic-based matchmaking to provide advanced user-centric service discovery. Here’s its architecture:

The MIDAS components facilitate profile encoding, manage user contexts, identify proper discovery scopes, and provide personalized service views depending on user context.

The MIDAS discovery model identifies three key entities involved in the discovery process: users, devices, and services. Users are the principals that can provide and request services and interact by accessing services via heterogeneous devices. Services are “black boxes” encapsulating physical/logical resources and providing the functions to operate on them. All MIDAS entities have profiles that describe their characteristics. To support user-centric discovery, MIDAS associates each user with a personal context space during each discovery session.

A profile has a modular structure and it is composed of different parts: identification, capabilities, requirements, and binding. Each profile part can be split into two categories: static metadata, e.g. entity names, user interests, and service functions; and dynamic metadata, e.g. entity location and device battery status. All profiles are represented in OWL.

MIDAS implementations are under development. There are some case studies discussed on its website. One of them is the NDA: News Discovery Assistant. NDA enables mobile users to access information services available on the Internet, such as newspaper reading services and radio/television digital broadcasting services. NDA retrieves information services that are available in the nearby of the current user location and manages access to these services, to provide mobile users with the news they are interested in.

A good start, isn’t it? Check the site now: MIDAS