Patent ID: 7681203

Claim:
A terminal connectable to a network, said terminal being adapted to support at least one of an application and a middleware entity to automatically discover services offered by said network, at least one of network topology changes and users' presence in order to execute a user-defined set of actions upon reception of event notification messages indicating an availability of specific services hosted on said terminal, a presence of other terminals interconnected via said network or a presence of a user operating one of said terminals whenever a number of predefined triggering conditions for triggering an execution of an action that is used to control the services is met, wherein said terminal includes the middleware entity having means for creating bindings between triggering conditions and profiles by assisting users to select triggering conditions, select or create profiles, and associate each triggering condition with at least one action from a selected or created profile, a core processing unit configured to manage an activation of a binding for an association of a given profile with given triggering conditions, by leveraging services of said means for creating bindings or by allowing applications to directly install said bindings by using a specified application programming interface (API), to monitor an occurrence of triggering conditions belonging to active bindings, to evaluate guard conditions for fine-grained control, wherein guard variables monitor properties of the terminal, and to execute said actions depending on the corresponding guard variables upon reception of event notification messages indicating any met triggering conditions, an Event Service system for registering a user for at least one of classes of events and specific events generated by specific event producers, for registering a user for complex classes of events by correlating events generated by at least one event producers and monitoring an occurrence of correlated events, for pre-processing event notification messages indicating an availability of specific services, and for forwarding said event notification messages only to registered users interested in at least one of said classes of events and said event notification messages generated by said specific event producers, and a unit configured to access said user-defined sets of actions from a distributed database including a multiplicity of profiles containing actions for requesting, activating, controlling and deactivating said services, respectively, and to execute said user-defined sets of actions.