Context-aware service infrastructure supporting ontology-based service model

Abstract

In the recent years, due to the notable advances in sensors, embedded systems and computer communications technologies, ubiquitous computing emerges as a next generation computing paradigm. It allows users to be provided with comprehensive services which intelligently interact with omnipresent computing resources in daily life as per user’s needs. Such smart service environments potentially consist of intelligent agents to provide appropriate service actions according to user’s situation or surroundings. This concept is called situation-aware service provision. To provide such situation-aware services, one of the major technical research and development topics is context-awareness. Currently, various approaches to context-aware service systems have been introduced. Their main goal is to challenge context-centric technical issues such as infrastructural support for abstraction of context providers, modeling and representation for context sharing, query and reasoning, context-based adaptation and actions, and so on. In the state-of-the-art context-aware service systems, contexts are acquired by a context abstraction layer and stored into a context knowledge base according to an ontology-based common context model. And a service is provided by firing a service rule which has a context expression in its condition part and a predefined service in its action part. Surely, such approach to context-aware service systems provides a pretty good solution for context-centric issues described above. But actually, a ubiquitous computing environment is dynamic in nature. It consists of unpredictable users and a number of ubiquitous service providing entities which are heterogeneous, spontaneous and ad hoc. Thus, the existing context-aware service systems may have some limitations in the real ubiquitous computing environments due to static integration of service providers, no way to declaratively describe a service to be triggered, and the lack of support for ad hoc interope...