Context management for user-centric context-aware services over pervasive networks

Abstract

Large and various amounts of context data related to a user's environment are available from different domains including mobile devices, smarthomes, wearable sensors, and social networking services. These context domains are interconnected and the context data from them can be shared thanks to mobile, pervasive, convergent, and ubiquitous technologies. We can provide user-centric context-aware services by aggregating and associating the diverse types of context data distributed over multiple domains around a user. However, state-of-the-art research efforts have been devoted to managing context only in a single domain. In this paper, for user-centric context management, we propose 1) a flexible and extensible technology-neutral information model that can represent generic concepts of context; 2) a hierarchical context management architecture that can understand and manage complex interactions among multiple contextual entities.