A Context Provisioning Framework to Support Pervasive and Ubiquitous Applications

Acquisition and dissemination of user and environment context information is critical in development and deployment of context-aware systems. It is fundamental to the success of such systems that they have access to a scaleable, robust and flexible context provisioning framework capable of working across all types of devices and networks. In this paper, we present the design, implementation and experiences of developing a context management system that incorporates these ideas. It is based on a consumer-provider broker model, where providers employ a common context representation format, decoupling various entities involved in the production and consumption of context information. We demonstrate how the idea of independent context providers can aid in end-to-end working of a context management framework. One of the major advantages compared to other approaches is the extendibility of the system. By progressively adding Context Providers to legacy mobile communication systems, new context domains can be added. The system is able to evolve constantly and support a variety of emerging context-aware services and applications.

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