## 2 Related Research and Motivational Challenges
As it can be concluded by the research in the literature [43; 76; 77; 78; 79; 80; 81; 82], the adoption of FIWARE in the development of smart agricultural applications is rather fragmentary and narrowed mostly to European researchers. On the other hand, the oneM2M [83] is a global partnership project established by the seven most important Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) in the world along with various industries and alliances. The main scope of this project is to define a horizontal service platform for enabling communication interoperability between machines. In these terms a technical report introducing a use case which involves oneM2M resource primitives and common service functionalities using MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol binding so as to apply remote monitoring and actuating of smart devices in an agriculture farm, was presented by the oneM2M Telecommunication Technology Committee as in [84]. Furthermore, as part of the oneM2M project, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) SmartM2M Technical Committee, has recently released, as part of the SAREF (Smart Applications REFerence ontology) family of standards, some new specifications for smart domains, which includes smart agriculture as well. More precisely, SAREF4 AGRI specification (ETSI TS 103 410-6) addresses the Smart Agriculture and Food Chain domain as in [85], with focus on livestock farming and smart irrigation use cases. Conclusively, these efforts, however significant they may be, are considered to be isolated and quite premature regarding the implementation of this platform to smart agriculture, since this issue does not seem to bring worth mentioned results in the scientific literature research. As deriving from the overviewed state of the art, most currently offered solutions of context-aware middleware frameworks are limited to particular services, relying mostly on local infrastructures with confined processing power and storage capabilities for context discovery and management, whereas agricultural industry trends with regard to Agriculture 4.0 practices highly rely upon complex and intelligent context driven services the demand for which is constantly increasing due to the development of novel smart sensors and devices. The fact that such lack in processing power and storage capabilities in current infrastructures limits the ability of managing great volumes of sensory data, constitutes a strong motivation for introducing an alternative solution for cloud-based context-aware middleware framework capable of transposing this kind of operations from local infrastructures to a distributed cloud environment. The need for developing a cloud-based context-aware middleware framework is enhanced by the inefficiency of conventional context management frameworks to handle multiple PF facility systems simultaneously. With this in mind, this research is motivated to introduce a framework that will be able to use the context deriving from one PF facility system so that it acts as a knowledge bank for another one within the cloud repository, could extend the cloud middleware's scalability and transform it into a flexible context source of knowledge for agricultural activities, offering significant support in the making of decisions and the delivering of real-time assistive actions. Finally, since the involvement of cloud computing attributes is about to broaden the variety of the offered services,the proposed framework is eager to use a single model which includes all kinds of services, such as instruction sets, software programs, and APIs for event alerts, could be delivered by the cloud platform infrastructure.