Abstract: Our experience with using the tuple space abstraction in
context-aware applications, evidenced that the traditional Linda matching
semantics based on value equality are not appropriate for this domain, where
queries often require the ability to match on value ranges, deal with
uncertainty, and perform data aggregation. Originally developed as the core
tuple space layer for the Lime middleware, LighTS provides a flexible
framework that makes it easy to extend the tuple space in many ways, including
changing the back-end implementation, redefining the matching semantics, and
providing new constructs. In this paper, we describe the design and programming
interface of LighTS, and show how its flexible architecture can be easily
extended to define novel constructs supporting the development of context-aware
applications.