Otsopack: Lightweight Framework for Ambient Intelligence Applications

Ambient intelligence (AmI) applications are characterized by a remarkable necessity of interoperability. In these intelligent environments, a wide variety of devices and platforms such as sensors, actuators or digital personality carriers (mobile devices) are usually deployed. If each application has been developed for each platform using ad-hoc services, the interaction and the chances of adding or replacing devices decreases. Paradigms such as Triple Space Computing -a tuplespace extension- are focused on enabling the interoperability and coordination of applications, by sharing information represented in a semantic format through a common virtual space. As long as the application developers use standard ontologies, different applications using the same spaces will interact automatically. To do so, a middleware that makes this abstraction possible is required. The focus of this paper is to present Otsopack, a Triple Spaces fully distributed middleware designed to enable the development of AmI applications running in mobile and resource constrained devices.