Foundations of Context Management in Distributed and Dynamic Environments

Abstract

Context information is data that describes the state of a certain entity at a specific moment. A context management system is a computational element responsible for binding context providers, which produce context information, and context consumers, typically represented by context-aware applications. The main task of a context management system is to match consumer’s interests with probed context information. The complexity of context management in a distributed scenario is defined by the wideness of an interest, i.e. the number of context management systems that should be involved in an interest matching. If a distributed scenario is also open, heterogeneous and dynamic, than the wideness of an interest is variable, as a result of characteristics such as dynamic introduction of new sensors and evolution of context models. The support of context interest of variable wideness imposes challenging requirements for context management systems.