Context-awareness in smart spaces

Any of our living environments can form a smart space that provides services and applications for the users according to their situations, the computing and communication facilities of the environment and the surroundings of the user. The ability to take into account the context of the user, and the digital and physical environment makes a space smart. This paper introduces a set of new capabilities that are required for achieving context-awareness in smart spaces. First, sensor data from the environment is acquired and aggregated. Second, the context data is interpreted and represented and possibly enhanced with external information. Thereafter, context reasoning is possible. Finally, situation based context reasoning is made by application agents that exploit domain ontologies for tuning context information to the situation in hand. The use of the introduced context-awareness concept is exemplified by an emergency scenario of a smart city.