An intelligent context interpreter based on XML schema mapping

Context-aware computing is one of the attractive research topics in pervasive computing. Context-aware systems can react to users' preferences according to context including location, time and other environment conditions. Context is generated by context interpreters or aggregated by context aggregators from the signals of sensors. A traditional context interpreter is usually built as an executable hard code called widget. It is difficult for the system manager to construct and maintain the large collections of context. In this paper, we propose an intelligent generic context interpreter using context scripts to overcome the hard code dependency between context and hardware devices. The generic context interpreter imports sensor data from sensor devices as an XML schema. Then, the schema matching approach is used to help system manager generating context scripts instead of widgets easily. The system was built and evaluated by different sensor schemas. The results show that the schema matching algorithm can match correct sensor types effectively and provide efficient context generation and maintenance.