Gateways of physical spaces in context-aware computing

Applications in context-aware computing continuously change their operations based on sensor data or services provided by various physical spaces in the real world, such as persons, shops and homes. We propose a gateway framework for physical spaces in this paper, which serves as a middleware platform for context-aware applications to access data from sensor networks deployed in these spaces. The gateway contains a number of components that facilitate the sensor data acquisition, processing and communication in context-aware applications. These include diversified services with plug-in management, a query processing engine with reasoning capability, and the global connection and local detection between gateways.