An integration bridge for heterogeneous e-service environments

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores

Home automation has evolved from a single integration of services (provided by devices, equipment, etc.) in the environment to a more broad integration of these core services with others(external to the environment) to create some added-value services for home users. This presents a key challenge of how to integrate disparate and heterogeneous e-service networks. To this, there exist already some good approaches but with some deficiencies. First, they fail to put in place some expeditious integration approach for having services registered across service domains. And then, do not provide a good method for having target services be transparently invoked from within the source environment. Thus, an enhanced integration concept is needed for tackling these challenges. As a solution, this work proposes an integration bridge concept, composed of two key elements: one, an interoperability bridge to go from service descriptions in the target environment format to service announcement in the source environment; and two, a service bridge, to have an image of the target service exist in the source environment as a service in itself. The concept has been tested and validated in JXTA-P2P source and W3C-WebServices target environments that much relate to Home Automation scenarios.