A Middleware for Context-Aware Applications and Services Based on Messenger Protocols

Nowadays most context-aware applications are independent proprietary pieces of software. A general framework or middleware deployed in the field does not exist; therefore the implementation of context-aware applications and services assumes the development of the whole application stack for each application. Along these development issues, deployment and privacy problems are to be solved. This imposes the following challenges concerning a middleware for context-aware applications: (1) we need an architecture that allows to implement and deploy services easily on the network. (2) We need a user interface that is widespread, well known to users and allows to manage one's privacy settings for every single service transparently. In this paper we describe our middleware's architecture for context-aware applications, based on messenger protocols