A Service-Oriented Middleware for Providing Context Awareness and Notification

In the last few years context awareness has emerged as an important element in distributed computing. It offers mechanisms that allow applications to be aware of their environment and enable these applications to adjust their behavior to the current context. Considering the dynamic nature of context, the data flow of relevant contextual information can be significant. In order to keep track of this information flow, a flexible service mechanism should be available for the client applications. In this document we propose a demonstration of the Awareness and Notification Service (ANS) middleware. ANS provides context-awareness capabilities to users and client applications. The conditions for the notification and the notification itself are defined in rules that users submit to the service by means of a convenient rule language.