Utilizing context in adaptive information services for pervasive computing environments

Abstract

Ubiquitous and pervasive computing environments have the potential to provide rich sources of information about a user and their surroundings. Such context information may form a ba-sis upon which Adaptive Information Services may be adapted. However, the nature of context in-formation means that it is usually gathered in an ad-hoc and distributed manner with many devices and sensors storing potentially relevant data. The reconciliation and reasoning across this information presents a research challenge, but has the possibility of yielding valuable insights about users. In an ad-hoc pervasive computing environment, determining context information cannot rely on a fixed meta-data schema. This work shows how an ontology driven context service architecture will perform distributed open schema queries over heterogeneous context sources in order to provide information service adaptation.