Sharing and Reusing Context Information in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

In highly dynamic environments it is not enough to model the user in order to provide proactive and personalized services. User features, preferences and needs change depending on different contextual aspects such as physical, social and computational conditions. Taking context into account in these environments implies coping with high openness and dynamicity of users and devices. Moreover, context modeling and context management is a complex task performed repeatedly in distributed environments, and users constantly share information about current activities, location, social events, goals, etc. In different applications. There is huge context information scattered over user's applications and devices that can be taken advantage of to provide more accurate adaptation and personalization. In this paper, we analyze the literature solutions with a focus on context information interoperability. We aim to identify basic requirements to perform the complex task of sharing and reusing context information between heterogeneous context providers and context consumers.