Modelling Context for Information Environments

Context-awareness has become an important consideration in the development of mobile and ubiquitous systems. While efforts have been made to develop general context models and application frameworks, it remains the case that often the notion of context supported is very restrictive and/or the representation of context is based on simple key-value pairs. As a result, most existing systems lack well-defined semantics and typing for context that would facilitate the general implementation, maintenance and adaption of context-aware systems. In this paper, we present a general context model that consolidates the models underlying many other approaches, while moving to a higher-level of abstraction in terms of semantic context description.