Users today have electronic devices dedicated to perform some functions defined by the manufacturer of a device. These devices often have data and functions that can be useful if made available to other devices in the user's environment. By doing so, they can enable more smart use cases that the manufacturer of a device could have foreseen.
 
Central to SOFIA project is the notion of smart space. A smart space is an ecosystem of interacting objects. Physically a smart space is formed by sensors, devices, and appliances that populate this space and it has the capability to self-organize itself, and to provide services and complex data to, for example, a person who physically traverses this space or a service that, queries remotely about the state of the entire space or part of it. This notion of immersion in the computing environment and at the same time the disappearance of computers is shared with the pervasive computing vision.
 
Moreover, a smart space has to be able to elaborate on basic services and raw data to provide orchestrated services or mash-up data to be used by the external world. These smart spaces thus poses many new challenges to embedded systems technologies, in terms of dynamicity (smart spaces are intrinsically dynamic as they need to continuously adapt on the basis of the context, habits, etc., by adding/removing/composing on-the-fly basic elements), scalability (smart spaces can span from a small to a very large the number of sensors/devices/appliances), trust (some smart spaces needs to be organized around a number of trusted entities), and privacy (some smart spaces built around a house for example should pay specific attention to privacy preservation).
 
Specifically we envision an environment, namely the SOFIA environment, where Embedded Systems (ESs) are able to connect, discover and enjoy personalized and cooperating services operating on interoperable, heterogeneous data. Connection at the lower level will occur through a SOFIA general overlay based on legacy connectivity and communication protocols that can be seen as the basic communication layer of the architecture. Logically this overlay can be formed by several islands of interconnected ESs. At a higher level of abstraction, each ES can participate to one or more smart spaces. ESs participating to the same smart space are connected through a second level overlay. From an application viewpoint, ESs participating to a smart space overlay may provide services/data to another smart space. Also in this case the smart space specific overlay can be seen as several islands formed by interconnected ESs.
 
More in detail, SOFIA Open Innovation reference Platform will support the inter-working of smart embedded services for creating and managing different smart spaces, through the use of composability and semantic techniques, in order to guarantee dynamicity, trust and scalability, while preserving privacy if needed. To this end SOFIA will employ peer-to-peer, service-oriented, event-based and context-awareness technologies in novel ways in order to define reference architecture for smart spaces. Moreover, the generality of the SOFIA architecture will be ensured through the identification of ontology for each of the smart space under investigation and by deriving a common ontology for all of them. This common ontology will lead to the layered architecture of the SOFIA platform and to the identification and specification of both, the core middleware and the smart-space specific services.
 
To summarize, the main objectives are:
 
Objective 1: the OIP reference platform providing the interoperability levels that enable interaction and data exchange between multivendor devices. This platform should also take into account relevant devices already existing in a target environment. The platform will support a range of devices from limited resources to resource-rich devices.
 
Objective 2: interaction models and embedded devices to support a variety of smart spaces and a variety of users. This will move today’s device oriented interaction modes to a user goal and result oriented interaction paradigm.
 
Objective 3: methods, techno-economic structures and toolkits for the deployment of smart environments and for the development of services and applications based on smart environments
 
Objective 4: scenarios and use cases to demonstrate the capabilities of the OIP and the proposed interaction models and techno-economic structures in personal spaces, indoor spaces and cities. A pilot showing the interoperability between these domains shall be set up and evaluated