A Light Reasoning Infrastructure to Enable Context-aware Mobile Applications

This paper presents a light inference system for context management, ready to perform reasoning tasks in resource-constrained devices. The inference system is part of a service-oriented mobile software framework which runs on Javaenabled handheld devices. This framework serves to facilitate the creation of context-aware applications, as it decouples sensor's data acquisition and context processing from the application logic itself. The inference architecture is composed by different modules, some of them encapsulate existing tools (ìJena and Bossam) that have been adapted to the mobile working environment. The (rule-based) reasoning is prepared to use a general ontology. Both applications and the framework's components may configure the query set in order to retrieve the information they need from the inference system. In the paper, a validation example shows how this process is done.