A Context Framework for Ambient Intelligence

ISTAG has developed the concept of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) to provide a vision on how the Information Society will develop. The aim is to achieve better integration of technology into our environment, so that people can freely and interactively use it. An indispensable component of AmI is user context. We claim that to realize the vision of AmI the following issues need to be addressed: the user context information need to be interoperable and machine processable since it will be exploited by a variety of devices. Therefore it is necessary to develop context ontologies. Furthermore, the user context should be globally accessible; this necessitates developing context servers. Considering that AmI devices accept input in different mark up languages; the context server needs to recognize the device and provide the information in the format that can be accepted by the device. More importantly, user context information should only be provided to the authorized entities and the user should be able to specify how much of that information should be available to whom. Finally, AmI is not restricted to local context obtained through sensors; integrating this information with the user profile and preferences opens up a way for real life applications where the user context can be exploited for Web service discovery and composition. In this paper, we present a framework to address exactly these issues. We show how context ontologies can be developed, stored, queried. We then describe mechanisms for the privacy and security of user context. Finally we present the way to exploit user context for Web service discovery and composition through ebXML registries.