Architectural Support for Global Smart Spaces

A GLObal Smart Space (GLOSS) provides support for interaction amongst people, artefacts and places while taking account of both context and movement on a global scale. Crucial to the definition of a GLOSS is the provision of a set of location-aware services that detect, convey, store and exploit location information. We use one of these services, hearsay, to illustrate the implementation dimensions of a GLOSS. The focus of the paper is on both local and global software architecture to support the implementation of such services. The local architecture is based on XML pipelines and is used to construct location -aware components. The global architecture is based on a hybrid peer-to- peer routing scheme and provides the local architectures with the means to communicate in the global context.