Context Awareness in Collaborative Platforms and Living Labs

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. We highlight the use of context-aware components in such platform. Furthermore,we experiment the use of such platform in rural community of fishery sector. We illustrate the added value of the composition of context-aware services in the collaborative platform. Building such framework requires, indeed, resolving two main issues: context semantics awareness model and seamless integration architecture. Context awareness is carried out using a semantic web model, which facilitates knowledge sharing and representation. 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” (FP62005-IST-5-03492) that aims to build a platform of networked living labs for context-aware collaborative working in rural areas.