Modeling and Processing Information for Context-Aware Computing: A Survey

Context-awareness is emerging as a central issue in ubiquitous computing research. Context-aware computing refers to the idea that computing devices can sense and react to the physical environment where they are deployed. A great deal of research on context-awareness has been conducted to explore and address the various challenges related to context acquisition, representation, distribution, and abstraction. This paper surveys the most relevant approaches to modeling context for ubiquitous computing. It also evaluates how the existing works utilize contextual information, with respect to the query processing approaches used to access and manage that information. We also discuss typical problems, shortcomings, and challenges posed by context modeling at large, and highlight some proposals to address some of them.