ACAI: agent-based context-aware infrastructure for spontaneous applications

The vision of people amalgamated with their surroundings in a spontaneous way created a new, context-aware era of human-computer interaction. The goal is to provide an infrastructure that can understand the current situation and act on that understanding. Context-awareness means that people, services and artifacts in an environment are integrated in a homogeneous manner in order to provide seamless service while still preserving privacy. To evolve from a passive state to an active pervasive state, the infrastructure must be able to support uniform context representation, to reason about context, to offer context-based service discovery, and to support a context management and communication protocol. In this paper, we present ACAI, an innovative Agent-based Context Aware infrastructure, equipped with the capabilities required to maintain spontaneous applications both locally and across different domains. We describe our ontology for modeling context that provides a common understanding of what context means and facilitates context inference. We propose a multi-agent framework that parallels the infrastructure design in order to assist in the development and runtime provisioning of spontaneous applications. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.