ACAI: Agent-based Context-aware Infrastructure for Spontaneous Applications
M. Khedr, A. Karmouch
Multimedia and Mobile Agent Research Lab,
School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa
161 Louis Pasteur St. Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5 Canada
mkhedr,karmouch@site.uottawa.ca

Abstract. The vision of people amalgamated with their surroundings in a spontaneous way created a new, context-aware era of human-computer interaction. The goal is to provide an infrastructure that can understand the current situation and act on that understanding. Context-awareness means that people, services and artifacts in an environment are integrated in a homogeneous manner in order to provide seamless service while still preserving privacy. To evolve from a passive state to an active pervasive state, the infrastructure must be able to support uniform context representation, to reason about context, to offer context-based service discovery, and to support a context management and communication protocol. In this paper, we present ACAI, an innovative Agent-based Context Aware infrastructure, equipped with the capabilities required to maintain spontaneous applications both locally and across different domains. We describe our ontology for modeling context that provides a common understanding of what context means and facilitates context inference. We propose a multiagent framework that parallels the infrastructure design in order to assist in the development and runtime provisioning of spontaneous applications.