Semantic-PlaceBrowser : Understanding Place for Place-Scale Context-Aware Computing

Our view of environment for context-aware applications is a place, which contains devices, digital services and people with their social contexts. Therefore, understanding place will contribute to the successful of applications. In this paper, we introduce two issues: (i) there is a need for sharing context knowledge about place; (ii) using a multiagent framework for modeling place will improve the system scalability and robustness. To support the idea, we have built a tool called SematicPlaceBrowser for discovering place context and contributing to the knowledge base. The knowledge base can be shared and contributed among different applications. The SemanticPlaceBrowser can be deployed at different scales, such as from a place as small as a room or as big as a shopping complex.