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.

Context Management technology is not novel itself, and ICT companies are already looking at this area and spending effort for a long time trying to find a technically feasible solution, appealing marketing usage and solve all the possible issues with its privacy and security concerns. However, after many years of technology scouting and academic scrutiny within this still innovating area, there is no unique best practice or reference standardization solving all the technological difficulties within this field. The context information available in the real world from many potential sources should be handled in a near real-time way, efficiently processed by many devices and be interoperable among different actors dealing with the context. Therefore not only a comprehensive context management framework shall be in the place but also efficient context representation formalism should be employed in order to represent the context data suitably for an autonomous Machine-to-Machine processing, with all the data maintained within that representation and with all the mechanisms or artifacts needed for a secure and privacy safeguarding sensitive data handling. This all compose a set of requirements to be respected in the context information data representation, which are listed and solved by the solution described within with paper.