Ontology-based Context Modeling to Facilitate Reasoning in a Context-Aware System: A Case Study for the Smart Home

A context-aware system provides services based on the current context of the environment and user activities. So, context management and reasoning in context-aware systems are important tasks. A formal context model based on ontology can play a vital role in facilitating reasoning by formally representing domain knowledge. This paper presents an ontology-based reusable generic context model for context-aware systems. This model provides a context vocabulary and structure for contexts and their semantics which are essential for reasoning. We evaluate the effectiveness of this model for both ontology and rule-based reasoning in the smart home domain and the result we obtain is promising.