Metadata Management of Context Resources in Context-Aware Middleware System

摘要

Metadata is the data about data. With the development of information technologies, it is realized that metadata is of great importance in discovery, identification, localization and access of resources. For the context-aware middleware, it is necessary to provide the metadata of context resources connected to it for the context consumers. However, the complexity of context-aware computing results in the diversity of context resources which makes it difficult in explicitly describing the metadata. In this paper, an XML-based markup language called VirtualSensorML is proposed for the purpose of providing model and schema to describe the metadata of context resources in an understandable format. It defines fundamental elements and various sub elements to describe the common and special properties of different context resources. The metadata management of context resources is currently implemented in a multi-agent based context-aware middleware. The evaluation demonstrates that it is efficient to improve the discovery of context resources.