A High Level Pub / Sub Layer for Open Distributed Heterogeneous Environments: the Concept-based Approach

The publish/subscribe interaction scheme is claimed to provide the loosely coupled form of interaction required in large scale environments. There are important implications for the underlying technological platform. Events must be detected and signaled as notifications, and they must be understandable beyond the closed confines of a single enterprise. Currently, pub/sub does not profit from the infrastructure to support such a set- ting, where data producers and consumers do not share common assumptions about exchanged data. Since pub/sub mechanisms decouple producers and consumers, they should share a common understanding in order to express their mutual interests. Events must be understandable beyond the closed confines of a single component or application (including apps that interact across traditional borders regardless of economic, cultural or linguistic differences). In this work the pub/sub paradigm is analyzed with the purpose to extend it to open distributed heterogeneous environments. On the basis of this analysis, a novel approach of combining ontologies and notifications is presented to support the correct interpretation of data coming from heterogeneous sources.