Une infrastructure de gestion de l'information de contexte pour l'intelligence ambiante
Pierson, Jérôme · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2009
In a pervasive computing environment, the environment itself is the interface between services and users. Using context information coming from sensors, location technologies and agregation services, applications adapt their run-time behaviour to the context in which users evolve (e.g., physical location, social or hierarchical position, current tasks as well as related information). These applications have to deal with the dynamic integration in the environment of new elements (users or devices), and the environment has to provide context information to newly designed applications. We study and develop a dynamic context management system for pervasive application. It is flexible enough to be used by heterogeneous applications and to run dynamically with new incoming devices. We have designed an architecture in which context information is distributed in the environment. Each device or service implements a context manager component in charge of maintaining its local context. It can communicate with other context manager components : some of them are context information producers, some of them are context information consumers and some of them are both. We have defined a simple protocol to allow a consumer to identify and determine the producer for the information it needs. Context manager components express their context information using an OWL ontology, and exchange RDF triples with each other. The openness of ontology description languages makes possible the extension of context descriptions and ontology matching helps dealing with independently developed ontologies. Thus, this architecture allows for the introduction of new components and new applications without interrupting what is working.