How can reasoning improve ontology-based context-aware system?

AbstractOver the past two decades, the large evolution of software engineering, telecommunication and pervasive devices has lead to emergence of a new vision of development aiming at building systems to meet more complex and personalised needs known as context-aware systems. This type of systems is becoming the next computing paradigm in which infrastructure and services are sensitive to any change of the context, so that plays a crucial role to provide interactive intelligent environments. In parallel, contextual situation refers to a higher level of information inferred from different context data flow that can be extracted from physical and virtual sensors. The power of using situation is lies in their ability to provide a simple and comprehensible representation of context property, which preserve the services that manipulate them from the complexity of sensor readings, data transmission errors and inferencing activities. In this work, we aim to explore the added value of using ontology-based reasoning, focusing on first-order logic and fuzzy logic, to produce contextual situations.