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.

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.

Efforts by the pervasive, context-aware system development community have over the years produced a wide variety of context-aware techniques and frameworks. However, a bulk of this technology tends to be strictly tied to a native system, thus largely limiting its external adoption. In addressing this limitation, we introduce an interoperable context representation format, in the form of an ontology, which models core context-aware concepts for re-use within pervasive computing environments. The DCON Context Ontology is proposed as a novel vocabulary for the representation of activity context as experienced by a user, and sensed through one or more of their devices. We demonstrate how, combined with other domain ontologies, DCON provides for richer representations of multi-level context interpretations that are integrated with other known background information about a user.