A Context Model for Context-Aware System Design Towards the Ambient Intelligence Vision: Experiences in the eTourism Domain

The Ambient Intelligence (AmI) vision implies the concept of "smart spaces" populated by intelligent entities. While most implementations focus strictly on local applications of "AmI", we think of an AmI scenario as a federation of instances of local and application AmI domains. In order to deal with distributed context handling in AmI domains, we propose a context model suitable for distributed context acquisition, reasoning and delivery to applications. We propose a hybrid approach, which aims at combining the advantages of object-oriented models for distributed context handling and those of ontology-based models for context reasoning. We have applied this model to the development of a context-aware eTourism application. This application aims at providing tourists with context-aware services supporting communication and knowledge exchange. It integrates already available location-based content delivery services with a context-aware instant messaging service and a provider reputation service. Here we describe main design issues and prototype implementation.