Context Representation and Management in a Pervasive Environment

Integrating computing and computing applications into surroundings instead of having computers as discrete objects is the objective of pervasive computing. Applications must adjust their behavior to every changing surroundings. Adjustment involves proper capture, management and reasoning of context. This paper proposes representation of context in a hierarchical form and storing of context data in an object relational database than an ordinary database. Semantic of the context is managed by ontology and context data is handled by object relational database. These two modeling elements are associated to each other by semantics relations build in the ontology. The separation of modeling elements loads only relevant context data into the reasoner therefore improving the performance of the reasoning process.