A service-oriented middleware for building context-aware services

The advancement of wireless networks and mobile computing necessitates more advanced applications and services to be built with context-awareness enabled and adaptability to their changing contexts. Today, building context-aware services is a complex task due to the lack of an adequate infrastructure support in pervasive computing environments. In this article, we propose a Service-Oriented Context-Aware Middleware (SOCAM) architecture for the building and rapid prototyping of context-aware services. It provides efficient support for acquiring, discovering, interpreting and accessing various contexts to build context-aware services. We also propose a formal context model based on ontology using Web Ontology Language to address issues including semantic representation, context reasoning, context classification and dependency. We describe our context model and the middleware architecture, and present a performance study for our prototype in a smart home environment.