Reasoning with modular ontologies for context-aware applications

Zusammenfassung

Context awareness is a key feature of adaptive applications and services developed on a ubiquitous computing infrastructure. Typical middlewares for managing context information rely on a centralized server to receive, process and deliver context information. However, such an approach has many drawbacks. Among them, we can mention that rule based reasoning is not fl exible at all. In this paper, a framework for the management of context information is presented. It is based on Semantic Web technologies for the representation of context, reasoning and inferencing over such information. The particularity of the pre sented framework is that it is distributed. The Semantic Web based ontology is partially distributed, being the rule sets used for personalized context reasoning and inferencing spread over the context information consumers. With such an approach, adaptive services and applications in ubiquitous computing scenarios can be developed easily. As a consequence, this framework paves the way for more powerful, fl exible and easy to develop and deploy adaptive ubiquitous computing applications.