Context-Aware Collaborative Platform in Rural Living Labs

Abstract

In this paper, we present a collaborative context-aware framework for rural living labs or rural innovation ecosystems as Social Spaces for Research and Innovation (SSRI). The proposed framework exploits seamless integration of standard ubiquitous computing technologies to support smart collaboration and knowledge sharing between rural communities. We underline an open collaborative platform based on context-aware components useful in any rural living lab area. This platform is focused on the bus component which acts as a connector for the different living labs. The bus architecture gives the advantage to facilitate the dynamic integration of living lab services using discovery and binding methods. It guarantees also the large scale interconnection of all the living labs. Building such framework requires resolving a main issue of the design approach. Moreover, we experiment the use of such platform in rural community of fishery sector. The work presented in this paper is one of the main results of the Collaboration@Rural (C@R) European research project: “a collaboration platform for working and living in rural areas” (FP6-2005-IST-5-03492) that aims to build a platform of networked living labs for context-aware collaborative working in rural areas.