A survey of context modelling and reasoning techniques

Development of context-aware applications is inherently complex. These applications adapt to changing context information: physical context, computational context, and user context/tasks. Context information is gathered from a variety of sources that differ in the quality of information they produce and that are often failure prone. The pervasive computing community increasingly understands that developing context-aware applications should be supported by adequate context information modelling and reasoning techniques. These techniques reduce the complexity of context-aware applications and improve their maintainability and evolvability. In this paper we discuss the requirements that context modelling and reasoning techniques should meet, including the modelling of a variety of context information types and their relationships, of high-level context abstractions describing real world situations using context information facts, of histories of context information, and of uncertainty of context information. This discussion is followed by a description and comparison of current context modelling and reasoning techniques and a lesson learned from this comparison.

Citation

Bettini, C.; Brdiczka, O.; Henricksen, K.; Indulska, J.; Nicklas, D.; Ranganathan, A.; Riboni, D. A survey of context modelling and reasoning techniques. Pervasive and Mobile Computing. 2010 April; 6 (2): 161-180.