Context Information Management (CIM): Application Programming Interface (API)

The purpose of this Group Specification is the (preliminary) definition of a standard API for Context Information Management (CIM-API) enabling close to real-time access to information coming from many different sources (not only IoT). The document shall define how such an API enables applications to perform updates on context, register context providers which can be queried to get updates on context, query information on current and historic context information and subscribe for receiving notifications on context changes. The criteria for choice of the API characteristics shall be based on results in WI UC and WI GAP.
This Group Specification is labelled "preliminary" because it should be published widely in order to elicit comment and critique from the user communities and their comments will be used to modify and improve the later final API specification. Accordingly a feedback process shall be described in this document.
This Group Specification shall be compatible with an example data model published at the same time (see Work Item MOD0), so that implementers of appropriate software can efficiently test and compare results and interoperability.