A Semantic Infrastructure for Personalizable Context-Aware Environments

Although a number of initiatives provide personalized context-aware guidance for niche use cases, a standard framework for context awareness remains lacking. This article explains how semantic technology has been exploited to generate a centralized repository of personal activity context. This data drives advanced features such as personal situation recognition and customizable rules for the context-sensitive management of personal devices and data sharing. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate how an innovative context-aware system has successfully adopted such an infrastructure. By treating these devices as part of a personal sensor network and analyzing the generated information collectively, valuable context information can be gathered and interpreted in an endless number of scenarios.