Mobile computing and pervasive environments are mainly characterized by heterogeneity of devices, with different capabilities, resources, operating systems and applications. In a realistic scenario for context-aware computing, middleware should be deployable in the whole distributed system, despite device's resource limitations, and the developer should be able to evolve the context model when new context-aware applications or context providers are introduced. This paper discusses how context

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... deling and design of middleware architecture can impact on the efficiency of provision, distribution and access of context information in heterogeneous environments. This paper describes a middleware architecture and design strategies in order to address such requirements.