A Space-Based Interoperability Model

Software components may need to reason on thematic information that are usually contextualized in several and different dimensions. A person, for instance, may be physically located in a room; may play a specific role in an organization chart; and may be associated with an RFID tag in a set of identifiers. Moreover, software components may require thematic information which are produced by other software components and, in turn, they may be sources of information. This paper presents an interoperability model based on spatial concepts. The spatial model supports the contextualization of thematic information in different spaces - be they conceptual or physical. Main concepts are spaces, locations and mapping between locations belonging to different spaces. The model constitutes the basis to enable information sharing between software components. From this point of view, software components declare their interest in information from specific spatial locations (subscription contexts) and diffuse information in possibly other specific spatial locations (publication contexts). In a framework reifying the model we propose, software components may retrieve information without knowing who are the other components in the system. Indeed, the model enforces the indirect communication between software components which may rely on different views of the information domain.