A Semantics-Based User Model for the Support of Personalized, Context-Aware Navigational Services

The ambient intelligence paradigm has evolved significantly during the last few years and aims at developing context-aware and adaptive systems that enable people to use personalized services. Context-awareness, semantics enriched services and adaptivity are among the features that characterize ambient intelligence systems. In this paper, we describe an ontology-based user model that captures and formally describes profile and context information, and enables rule-based reasoning on the available data to support personalized context-aware navigation services. We also describe how the proposed model is used as a basic building block for the development of a contextual guide for users in indoor environments, C-NGINE (contextual navigation guide for indoor environments).