Group knowledge management for context-aware group applications and services

Applications/services that cater to groups of users (or entities) in ubiquitous computing environments must utilise the concept of context-awareness in order to provide group adapted content or services. Most existing frameworks that support group applications/services focus on lower level issues such as group membership management or group communication, failing to give attention to context-awareness, while those that address context-awareness are mostly application specific. However, the introduction of a generic framework for the above situation can be challenging for several reasons, such as the heterogeneity of the applications/services and the complexity of interpreting group information compared to single user information. This paper proposes a generic framework for group knowledge management that overcomes these challenges. The framework supports the above mentioned applications/services in extracting group knowledge regarding the involved entities. A prototype implementation including functionality to query group knowledge is presented as well.