A Survey of Semantics-Based Approaches for Context Reasoning in Ambient Intelligence

A key issue in the study of Ambient Intelligence is reasoning about context. The aim of context reasoning is to deduce new knowledge, based on the available context data. The endmost goal is to make the ambient services more "intelligent", closer to the specific needs of their users. The main challenges of this effort derive from the imperfect context information, and the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of the ambient environments. In this paper, we focus on semantics-based approaches for reasoning about context. We describe how each approach addresses the requirements of ambient environments, identify their limitations, and propose possible future research directions.