A System for Distributed Context Reasoning

Context aware systems use context information to adapt their behaviour accordingly. In order to derive high level context information from low level context, such as sensor values, context reasoning methods that correlate observable context information, are necessary. Several context reasoning mechanisms have been proposed in the literature. Usually these mechanisms are centralized, leading to suboptimal utilization of network resources and poor system performance in case of largescale scenarios. Therefore to increase the scalability of context reasoning systems the development of methods that distribute the reasoning process is necessary. Existing distributed approaches are method specific and do not provide a generic formalization for distributed reasoning. In this paper we introduce a novel system which enables distributed context reasoning in a generic way that is independent of the reasoning algorithm.