Adding High-level Reasoning to Efficient Low-level Context Management: A Hybrid Approach

Rule-based context reasoning is an expressive way to define situations, which are crucial for the implementation of many context-aware applications. Along the scenario of the Conference Guard application we show how this reasoning can be done both by leveraging an efficient context management (realized by the Nexus platform) and by a generic rule based service. We present the architecture of the Nexus semantic service, which uses the underlying definition of a low-level context model (the Nexus Augmented World Model) to carry out rules given in first order logic. We realize this service in a straight forward manner by using state-of-the-art software components (the Jena 2 framework [1]) and evaluate the number of instances this approach can handle. Our first experiences show that a pre-selection of instances is necessary if the semantic service should work on a large-scale context model.