Contextual Reasoning in Context-Aware Systems
Schmidtke Hedda R. · Ambient intelligence and smart environments · 2012
Adding reasoning abilities to context-aware systems has been a focus of research in pervasive computing for several years and a broad range of approaches has been suggested. In particular, the well-known trade-off between expressivity and inferential power has been discussed as a major concern, as dimensions of context include well-known hard domains, such as spatial, temporal, and causal knowledge. In practice however, experiments report acceptable run-times and complexity of the used reasoning mechanism does not seem to be an issue at all. Two questions are addressed in this paper: why this is the case and whether these positive results will scale up as context-aware systems are leaving their experimental environments, are extended and modified by application developers, and employed in everyday life by millions of end-users.