A design model for context-aware services based on primitive contexts

This paper describes a conceptual model for reasoning about context. The concepts introduced here may be applied in designing context-aware services and modelling context-sensitive interactions between context-aware systems. We introduce the concept of “primitive context” as the basic context abstraction. The concept of “primitive context” effectively captures the notion of “context” and provides a basis for formalising and reasoning about context in a consistent and conceptually simple way. A primitive context reflects an adaptation capability of a system. Each primitive context is associated with an ontology that describes the capabilities, relations and information valid for that particular context.