Development of a Cooperative Middleware to Provide Context-Aware Service in Smart Home

To realize smart home services, several context-aware applications should be deployed which adapt their behavior depend on context information of home occupants. For context-aware service, context providing, processing, reasoning, delivery and designing context-aware applications are complex tasks. Although every application uses its registered contexts to provide services but some of the contexts are common for different services. So, it is wise to compute contexts at once and distribute to each application cooperatively rather than compute the same context for different application separately. Here the context reusable mechanism can significantly reduce the context computing cost. For this purpose, middleware-based implementation is a good alternative. Middleware uses raw data through sensors then generates context using these data, and finally conveys context to applications. In this paper, we present a context-aware middleware which provides above tasks and supports context sharing in cooperative manner. Context reasoning is an important task in context-aware systems. A formal context model based on ontology can play a vital role in facilitating reasoning by formally representing domain knowledge. We model domain context using ontology and adopt FOL which helps the context reasoning.