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Table 1. A comparison of the C4IF and LCIM interoperability models
Focus
C4IF (Peristeras & Tarabanis 2006)
Enhanced LCIM (Tolk et al. 2006; 2008)
Behaviour
Collaboration
interoperability focuses on the abil-
ity of actions/behaviors to act together, and uses a
process as an object of integration. Technologies:
Service ontologies, SOAs, Web Services, Semantic
Web Service technologies.
Conceptual
interoperability focuses on abstraction and
modelling; it is targeted to the complete the shared
understanding of the data model concepts, not only the
concepts of a domain, but also those concepts which
are not included in the data model. Thus, conceptual
interoperability narrows the scope of the data model
so that it is meaningful for its user(s) - the application
agent(s). Technologies: Platform independent models,
domain specific architectural frameworks.
Change of context
No separation of the context data from other data.
Dynamic
interoperability deals with changes in the
context data, the meanings of these changes and the
inter-modal and intra-modal transformations that these
changes require in a system. Technologies: Enhanced
Meta-Object Facility, agent mediated decision support.
Context
Pragmatic
interoperability deals with the context data
specified as the internal state of the system and the
specification of the particular system process that will
employ the data. Technologies: Web Ontology language
(OWL), Unified Modeling Language (UML), Model
Driven Architecture (MDA).
The meaning of data
Consolidation
interoperability focuses on the ability
to understand data, uses information as an object
of integration, and is out of usage. Technologies:
Thesaurus, taxonomies, common vocabularies, RDF,
Schemas, ontologies, Semantic Web technologies.
Semantic interoperability
deals with the meaning of
exchanged data to the data users, i.e. the meaning is
shared. Technologies: eXtensible Markup Language
(XML), namespaces, schemas.
Data
Communication
interoperability provides the abil-
ity to exchange data, uses information as an object
for integration, and is out of context. Technologies:
Data formats, dictionary, Structural Query Language
(SQL).
Syntactic
interoperability defines the correct forms and
the correct order of the exchanged data. Technologies:
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), XML tagging.
Network
Connectivity
Connection
interoperability provides the ability to
exchange signals, uses a channel as an object of in-
tegration, and is out of content. Technologies: cable,
infrared, Bluetooth.
Technical
interoperability provides a technical connec-
tion to exchange digital signals, but the participating
systems have to make an agreement on how to interpret
these signals. TCP/IP, as an example technology.
reasoning about information that is potentially
useless for them. Moreover, as smart environ-
ments are envisioned to be open, heterogeneous,
and variable, it is crucial to ensure that the smart
applications behave adaptively and efficiently in
several deployment settings and runtime condi-
tions. To enforce high-level adaptation strategies,
it is also crucial to provide effective support for
the monitoring of useful information, such as user
movements, device status, resource availability
and the Quality of Service, which will trigger
application adaptations. Filtering and adaptation
strategies should be expressed at a high level of
abstraction by cleanly separating the application
management from the application logic. This
separation of concerns allows the complexity of
application developments for pervasive environ-
ments to be reduced and enables rapid application
prototyping, run-time configuration, and mainte-
nance (Toninelli et al. 2009).
Context awareness represents an effective
means to improve the scalability of smart spaces
through the means of filtering and adaptation. The
context-aware adaptation of applications basically
requires the following three building blocks:
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