Investigation of a hierarchical context-aware architecture for rule-based customisation of mobile computing service

摘要

The continuous technical progress in the smart-phone built-in modules and embedded sensing techniques creates opportunities for smart applications integrating these techniques to assist people's daily lives by context-aware automation and decision support. The context-aware systems are expected to be efficient in user interaction and even intelligent to be aware of users' preferences and provide users' expected service without imposing undue technological complexity. To this end, it is challenging but significant to exploit the relevant computational context as implicit input to characterise the user and physical environment and provide computing service that is customised to the contextual situations. However, the heterogeneity in techniques, complexity of contextual situations, and gap between raw sensor data and machine understandable context keep the techniques from truly integration and lead to difficulties for gathering and extensive use of context. Studies in this area mainly focus on feasibility demonstration of the emerging techniques, and they lack general architecture supports and appropriate service customisation strategies. The work of this thesis concentrates on the context-aware computing architecture handling the heterogeneous devices and technologies and the service customisation strategy dealing with context information complicated in structures and semantic relations regarding different domain knowledge.