A Service-Oriented Platform for Pervasive Awareness Systems

Awareness systems are a class of computer mediated communication systems that help individuals or groups build and maintain a peripheral awareness of each other. In this paper a service-oriented platform is presented, that supports awareness and informal social communication between community members, distributed over multiple smart home environments. The ASTRA platform, developed in the context of an EU research project, provides a generalized solution to the development of awareness applications that are based on the concept of pervasive awareness, i.e., where awareness information is generated as a result of using personal and home devices and smart objects, which capture and exchange information about the user semi-autonomously.