CREATING CONTEXT-AWARE COLLABORATIVE WORKING ENVIRONMENTS

Context-aware systems are intended for providing services adapted to the needs of people, by taking into account their state and the information related to their environment. One alternative to represent this context information resides in the use of Semantic Web ontologies. They provide a formal vocabulary which allows to easily express and share knowledge. Additionally, several types of automatic knowledge manipulation and reasoning processes become available thanks to the formal features of such ontologies. The inclusion of context information through ontologies in Collaborative Working Environments (CWEs) may bring important benefits to team work inside an organization, such as an automatic selection between different collaborative services according to the team members' preferences and their current state. This paper describes the design and implementation of a context-reasoning system which has been integrated into a CWE architecture to take advantage of context-awareness.