Prottoy: A middleware for sentient environment

Our approach towards context awareness is to retrieve contextual information by augmenting our daily life objects (like a chair, a mirror etc.) with sensing capabilities. We call such artefacts sentient artefacts. To avoid developing dedicated context-aware application integrating these artefacts, there is a need for a generic computing platform that can assist application programmers to develop and deploy applications easily and rapidly. We present a framework titled "Prottoy" for context-aware applications. The framework provides a generic interface for interacting with sentient artefacts in a unified way, regardless of their type and properties. As a result, application development is simple, rapid and independent from the underlying environments. This paper describes the design and implementation of Prottoy.