A modular lightweight implementation of the Smart-M3 semantic information broker

Abstract

Interoperability among heterogeneous devices is one of the main topics investigated nowadays to realize the Ubiquitous Computing vision. Smart-M3 is a software architecture born to provide interoperability through the Semantic Web technologies and reactivity thanks to the publish-subscribe paradigm. In this paper we present a new implementation in Python of the central component of the Smart-M3 architecture: the Semantic Information Broker (SIB). The new component, named pySIB, has been specifically designed for embedded or resource constrained devices. pySIB represents a new open source lightweight and portable SIB implementation, but also introduces new features and interesting performances. JSON has been introduced as the default information encoding notation as it offers the flexibility of XML with minor bandwidth requirements. Memory allocation on disk and at runtime is in the order of Kilobytes i.e. minimal, if compared with the other reference implementations. Performance tests on existing (SP2B) and ad-hoc benchmarks point out possible improvements but also encouraging data such as the best insertion time among the existing SIB implementations.