Ontology-based negotiation protocol and context-level agreements

Context-aware services and applications in pervasive environments require context information in order to adapt to the needs of users and to changes that occur in their environment. The traditional approach to context delivery results in largely unneeded context flooding the network and restricting the ability of consumers to limit and personalize the context information they receive. In this paper, we introduce an ontology-based context- level negotiation protocol. This protocol allows the client (the consumer of the context) to negotiate the desired information with the context provider. We describe a context-aware system architecture with the key components that allow the context to be acquired, represented and disseminated. Advanced features such as inference are proposed through the use of ontologies.