A context information service using ontology-based queries

Abstract

Ubiquitous computing environments have the potential to provide rich sources of information about a user and their surroundings. However, the nature of context information means that it must be gathered in an ad-hoc and distributed manner with many devices and sensors storing potentially relevant data. In an ad-hoc ubiquitous computing environment, retrieval of context information cannot rely on a fixed meta-data schema. This works shows how an ontology driven context service architecture may perform distributed open schema queries over heterogeneous context sources in a potentially decentralised manner.