A context management framework for supporting context-aware distributed applications

Service platform functions are enablers of adaptive communication services and applications that hide the heterogeneity of the infrastructure, manage personal reachability, manage implicit context, and adapt modality to the context. Furthermore, they can offer a diversity of services, whereby an optimal tradeoff can be made for end users in comfort, cost, security, and mobility. We consider the enablers of context-aware services in distributed environments and present a context management framework that is generic through its hierarchic ordering of context sources and extensible with multiple reasoning realizations. The article focuses on the architectural principles and reasoning methods of the framework