An infrastructure to provide context-aware information and services to mobile users

Abstract

Mobile devices have undergone great changes in the last few years, turning into powerful hand-held computers. This, together with the numerous information sources they have access to, both in form of physical sensors and applications with access to the Internet and large amounts of personal data, make them an ideal platform for the deployment of context-aware applications. In this paper we present a context management infrastructure for mobile environments, responsible for dealing with the context information which will enable mobile application and services to adapt their behaviour to meet user needs. This infrastructure relies on semantic technologies to improve interoperability, and is based on a central element, the context manager. This element acts as a central context repository and takes most of the computational burden derived from dealing with this kind of information, thus relieving from these tasks to more resource-scarce devices in the system. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.