A middleware for building context-a ware mobile services

Computing becomes increasingly mobile and pervasive today; these changes imply that applications and services must be aware and adapt to highly dynamic environments. Today, building context-aware mobile services is a complex and time-consuming task. In this paper, we present a Service-oriented Context-Aware Middleware (SOCAM) architecture for the building and rapid prototyping of context-aware mobile services. We propose an ontology-based approach to model various contexts. Our context model supports semantic representation, context reasoning and context knowledge sharing. We take a service-oriented approach to build our middleware which supports tasks including acquiring, discovering, interpreting, accessing various contexts and interoperability between different context-aware systems.