The main objective of the CASHMERE project is to develop a framework that enables dynamic means of controlling access to web resources (web services that wrap over virtual or physical things - such as smart lights in a room or control of a teleconference application). Such a method is highly relevant in numerous Internet of Things (IoT) and Web-of-Things (WoT) applications, from smart office buildings to intelligent manufacturing.

The framework is meant to be exploited by intelligent software agents that operate on behalf of human users, and whose environment of interaction is the world wide web. This is the vision shared by the W3C WebAgents Community. 

Since agent interactions over the web are dynamic, the CASHMERE framework enables the owners of smart web services and things to set access conditions to the resources used by agents, using context information generated in the hypermedia (web) environment itself. 

The result of the project thus has the potential to be a core functionality in the set of interaction scenarios envisioned by the WebAgents Community.

In hypermedia-driven Multi-Agent Systems (HyperAgents) the web and its architecture act like a global environment in which different types of agents (whether human or software) perform interactions and compose the functionality of web-enabled things to achieve their goals.

The main objective of this project is the development of a web-based framework facilitating context-aware search and discovery of web-enabled things in hypermedia driven environments.  The requirement is to facilitate the detection and understanding of shared context between a producer and a consumer to enable corresponding discovery of and access to relevant web resources to agents operating in the web environment. 

To achieve its objective the project aims to:

• Develop a web-based platform that can expressively model relevant context information of web things and enable a semantic-query and complex-event processing based mechanism to define and detect situations of shared context between web things and agents; 

• Develop a web-based APIs that take the detection of a shared context as input and are able to facilitate the creation of authorization elements that integrate into existing access control and search technologies for web things.

Have a look at the extended set of objectives and the implementation plan.

The project is developed by the laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Agent Systems (AIMAS), part of the PRECIS research center (Research Center for products, processes and innovative smart services) within the Department of Computers of the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers at UPB.

Funding for the project is supported by UEFISCDI under grant number PN-III-P1-1.1-PD-2021-0756.