An open context information management infrastructure the IST-Amigo project

The Context Management Service (CMS) is an open infrastructure for managing context information developed in the Amigo project. The Amigo project is an IST Integrated Project which focuses on ambient intelligence for the networked home. Topics in the Amigo project include, but are not limited to, ambient intelligence, interoperability between different home related protocols and standards, and context management. One of the outputs of the Amigo project is in the form of (mostly open source) middleware for these particular topics, as well as demonstrator software to show the value of the middleware. The role of the CMS is to acquire information coming from various sources, such as physical sensors, user activities, and applications in process or internet applications and to subsequently combine or abstract these pieces of information into "context information" to be provided to context aware services. This article introduces the basic principles underlying the CMS design and implementation and illustrates its application to implementing an ambient intelligence enabled home environment, supporting users in handling daily routine tasks such as the morning waking up. The most salient features of the CMS include: - Its compliance to the web service architecture both for interfacing to context consuming applications and for integrating its sub components. - The modeling of context information using a high level language with much expressiveness. - State of the art context sources such as a context history manager and an audio based positioning system.