The Spatial Interaction Laboratory — A Distributed Middleware and Qualitative Representation for Ambient Intelligence

Personal communication and relationships within spatially distributed or separated groups can be difficult to establish and maintain. A promising approach investigated with respect to this problem are ambient intelligence and smart environments equipped with perception and communication technology. These technologies require a standardized way to access sensors, actuators, and to develop applications for them to be usable. Furthermore, they have to address concerns like privacy in order to be accepted. We propose a middleware based on a distributed reasoning concept and a qualitative spatial privacy aware representation to address these requirements.