Ontology-based User Context Management: The Challenges of Dynamics and Imperfection

Robust and scalable user context management is the key enabler for the emerging context- and situation-aware applications, and ontology-based approaches have shown their usefulness for capturing especially context information on a high level of abstraction. But so far the problem has not been approached as a data management problem, which is key to scalability and robustness. The specific challenges lie in the imperfection of high-level context information, its time-dependence and the variability in the dynamics between its different elements. The approach presented in this paper presents a layered data model which structures the problems and is geared towards flexible and efficient query processing in combination of relational database and logic-based techniques. The techniques have been successfully applied for context-aware corporate learning support.