Context-Aware Coordination in the Sensors' Continuum

Pervasive computing technologies such as sensor networks and RFID tags will soon densely pupulate our everyday environments. These, together with the increasing diffusion of geospatial Web 2.0 tools such as GoogleEarth, will soon form the basis of a shared distributed information space capable of producing and storing data about the physical and social worlds and their processes. This opens up the possibility of exploiting such information space as a general-purpose coordination infrastructure to facilitate users in gathering information about the world, interact with it in a context-aware way, and coordinate with each other via the mediation of that infrastructure. However, the extremely distributed and heterogeneous nature of such infrastructure and the potentially incredible density of the information produced within (at the very extreme, a spatio-temporal continuum of information), introduces several issues related to the management of such infrastructure, i.e., the need for properly aggregating data to abstract from its actual density and to enable multilevel views, and the need for representing data in a simple, uniform, and easy to be managed way. In this paper, after having sketched our general vision for such future coordination infrastructure, we analyse and discuss the key research chalenges to data aggregation and data representation, and present our current research and experimental activity in these areas.