A High Level Pub/Sub Layer for Open Distributed Heterogeneous Environments

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.