A Cloud-Enabled and Service-Oriented Framework for Context-Awareness towards Smarter Environments

Abstract

Without any room for doubt, the journey towards the envisioned smarter planet is on the right track. Several things are happening in parallel to make the chosen route streamlined and smooth. Pragmatic ideas and concepts are being unearthed, scores of state-of-the-art technologies are fast emerging and evolving, processes are being greatly synchronized to be ready for efficiently tackling nextgeneration requirements, recurring situations and scenarios are being continuously captured, refined and deposited as widely usable and reusable patterns, policies and knowledge bases are being formulated towards the much-touted IT autonomy, insightfully integrated platforms are being designed, modular architectures are given extra thrust, infrastructures are being continuously optimized through a bevy of rationalization, virtualization, containerization, automation, and sharing techniques, natural and adaptive interfaces are being developed, facilitating frameworks and enabling tools, key guidelines, best practices, and pathbreaking products are being produced and made available across, etc. The idea is to empower IT to be multi-faceted, converged, dynamic, and smart. In this paper, having understood the inherent need for contextawareness in order to develop and sustain a variety of smarter environments, we have described how we designed and implemented a viable and value-adding context-awareness framework and deployed it in a cloud environment.