Introduction to CRIME

CRIME (Consistent Reasoning in a Mobile Environment) is a logic-based coordination language, which was developed by Christophe Scholliers and Eline Philips during their master thesis. CRIME implements the Fact Space Model, which was designed by Christophe and Eline in collaboration with their supervisors Stijn Mostinckx and Charlotte Herzeel.

CRIME allows applications to specify logic rules which specify how the applications should respond to changes in its immediate environment. Such changes are modelled by the addition or removal of facts which contain context information.

A key feature of CRIME is that applications can explicitly respond to the removal of information. This gives fine-grained control over how an application should respond to disconnection, which implicitly removes information from the system.

The CRIME Engine that was developed by Christophe and Eline in the context of their master thesis is available for download here.

Publications

S. Mostinckx, C. Scholliers, E. Philips, C. Herzeel, W. De Meuter. Fact Spaces: Coordination in the Face of Disconnection. In Murphy and Vitek (eds.), Proc. of the 9th Int. Conf. on Coordination Models and Languages (COORDINATION). LECT NOTES COMPUT SC 4467, pp. 268–285. Springer Verlag, June 2007. (pdf,bibtex)

Describes the Fact Space Model and contrasts it to existing coordination languages geared towards mobile ad hoc networks. Illustrates how a collaborative jukebox application can be constructed using CRIME rules

C. Scholliers, E. Philips Coordination in Volatile Networks. Master Dissertation, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2007. (pdf)

Master thesis which describes the design of the CRIME middleware in full detail with additional example applications. This dissertation also contains extensions to the default CRIME language not covered in the COORDINATION paper.

E. Philips, C. Scholliers, C. Herzeel and S. Mostinckx Reasoning About Past Events in Context-Aware Middleware In Mügge et al. (eds.) Proc. of the 3rd Int. WS. on Object Technology for Ambient Intelligence and Pervasive Systems. Pp. 27-32. (pdf)

Proposes the addition of operators from Metric Temporal Logic to the CRIME coordination language and illustrates how they can be used to make applications provide smarter context-aware behavior.