Bridging Context Management Systems for Different Types of Pervasive Computing Environments

A context management system is a distributed system that enables applications to obtain context information about (mobile) users and forms a key component of any pervasive computing environment. Context management systems are, however, very environment-specific (e.g., specific for home environments) and do not interoperate very well. This limits the operation of context-aware applications because they cannot get context information on users that reside in an environment served by a context management system that is of a different type than the one used by the application. In this paper, we address this problem by placing bridges between different types of context management systems, in particular for home, mobile, and ad-hoc environments. The novelty of our bridges is that they focus on resolving functional differences between context management systems, in particular for context discovery and exchange. We discuss our bridging architecture for a few selected bridges and describe their implementation.