A strategy for cooperative reasoning in ubiquitous computing environments

Abstract

In ubiquitous computing systems, heterogeneous applications must be capable of responding to dynamic changes in their environments with minimal human interference and strongly relying on context information. Reasoning is necessary in ubiquitous systems mainly for transforming raw context data into meaningful information and for infering new implicit context information that may be relevant for the applications. Besides that, reasoning is fundamental for triggering actions or adaptations according to specific situations described by rules. These rules typically depend on several context variables, which may originate from different distributed sources. Hence, we propose a strategy for cooperative context reasoning of complex situations involving a reasoner for the user side and a reasoner for the ambient side.