Geographic-Aware Architecture for the Interoperability of Ubiquitous Components

In this paper we present a novel software architecture (ArUC) to simplify the development of ubiquitous systems, providing a set of fundamental services that have been identified as useful and desirable for any ubiquitous system. This architecture solves the three main issues related to spontaneous interoperability (initialization, discovering and interaction). To solve them we have developed a set of protocols that enable heterogeneous components to dynamically locate other components and to invoke any of their services. The architecture is composed of a set of services implemented in JXTA and an ontology-based inference engine. By using the ArUC infrastructure, clients (mobile or static) are able to perform semantic and geographic-aware queries to the ubiquitous environment and dynamically find instances of a desired service. We also present a couple of applications that were developed using our proposed architecture.