Policy-Based Ambiguity Reduction in Pervasive Context-Aware Systems

There has been an ever-increasing interest in contextaware computing expressed by the pervasive computing community. As researchers attempt to create pervasive systems that are unobtrusively embedded in the environment, completely connected, intuitive, effortlessly portable, and constantly available, often do they run into the problem of ambiguity in the determination of the surrounding context. With the presence of context ambiguity, pervasive systems become more incapable of adapting themselves with the surrounding environment. This article describes a policy-based framework for reducing ambiguity in context aware systems. Experimental results show the performance of the system as the number and size of disambiguating policy rules increase.