Towards Seamless Binding of Context-aware Services to Ubiquitous Information Sources

The area of context-aware computing has received much attention in the last decade. However, many systems to determine a user´s context are focused on integrating a confined set of sensors into their decision-making algorithms, and lack extensibility for new and novel sources of context information. This limitation however has often resulted in monolithic software systems, reasoning on the user´s context from a static set of pre- defined rules. Therefore, most of these systems can not adapt to the user during runtime, and have not found wide adoption in reality. Unlike the existing approaches, we present a concept for a context-aware system circumventing these limitations by providing generic abstraction layers among its components. We show a concept for an extensible context-aware system with autonomous adaptation to changes in the user´s preferences, and provide arguments for our design decisions. After presenting the constraints for all participating entities, including sensors, middleware, and actuation and/or application frontends, we describe ContextFramework. KOM, an example implementation of the proposed concept.