A middleware for building context-aware mobile services

TLDR

Computing is increasingly mobile and pervasive, requiring applications to adapt to dynamic environments, yet building context‑aware mobile services remains complex and time‑consuming. The authors present SOCAM, a service‑oriented middleware for building and rapidly prototyping context‑aware mobile services. SOCAM employs an ontology‑based context model that supports semantic representation, reasoning, and knowledge sharing, and a service‑oriented architecture that acquires, discovers, interprets, accesses various contexts, and enables interoperability between context‑aware systems.

Abstract

Computing becomes increasingly mobile and pervasive today; these changes imply that applications and services must be aware and adapt to highly dynamic environments. Today, building context-aware mobile services is a complex and time-consuming task. We present a service-oriented context-aware middleware (SOCAM) architecture for the building and rapid prototyping of context-aware mobile services. We propose an ontology-based approach to model various contexts. Our context model supports semantic representation, context reasoning and context knowledge sharing. We take a service-oriented approach to build our middleware which supports tasks including acquiring, discovering, interpreting, accessing various contexts and interoperability between different context-aware systems.