Context consistency management using ontology based model

Abstract

Inconsistent contexts are death-wounds which usually result in context-aware applications' incongruous behaviors and users' perplexed feelings, therefore the benefits of context-aware computing will become less believed. This problem occurs in most sensor based applications due to the intrinsic drawbacks of fallible physical sensors which can only detect some evidence of real world's situations rather than global views of them. In this paper, we extend ontology based context modeling approach with some descriptive information added to contexts, modify reasoners to support time information, bring in a context life-cycle management strategy, establish a context exploitation mechanism, and propose an inconsistency resolution algorithm, fostering timely, exact and conflict-free contexts. Besides, evaluations and a case study are carried out to attest our design principles. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.