Supporting context-aware mobile service adaptation with scalable context discovery platform

Context-aware mobile service can seamlessly adapt to the environment with minimal user distraction. A major challenge in the adaptation procedure is to locate the desired context information. Such process is called context discovery. It is noticed that previous work has not addressed thoroughly the issue of context discovery beyond smart space boundaries, but focused mainly on local space discovery. In this paper, we propose a wide-area context discovery platform, called "Orion". Orion employs peer-to-peer system techniques to link the distributed context gateway (CG) into Orion network (ONet), which enables context queries to be forwarded from space to space. ONet is partitioned into semantic community (SeCOM) according to the semantic classification of context, such that context queries are routed only to the appropriate SeCOM which is able to resolve them.