AmbientDB: P2P data management middleware for ambient intelligence

The future generation of consumer electronics devices is envisioned to provide automatic cooperation between devices and run applications that are sensitive to people's likings, personalized to their requirements, anticipatory of their behavior and responsive to their presence. We see this 'ambient intelligence' as a key feature of future pervasive computing. We focus here on one of the challenges in realizing this vision: information management. This entails integrating, querying, synchronizing and evolving structured data, on a heterogeneous and ad-hoc collection of (mobile) devices. Rather than hard-coding data management functionality in each individual application, we argue for adding high-level data management functionalities to the distributed middleware layer. Our ambientDB P2P database management system addresses this by providing a global database abstraction over an ad-hoc network of heterogeneous peers.