Supporting Development of Context-aware Applications Using Semantic Space Toolkit

In order to facilitate rapid development of context-aware applications, there is a need for architectural support in the entire context processing flow, and improved programming abstractions that ease the prototyping. In this paper, a toolkit called Semantic Space, is proposed to support rapid prototyping of context-aware applications via a set of programming abstractions on context processing. The functionality encapsulated in the toolkit handles the common, time-consuming and low-level details in context acquisition, aggregation, storage and inference. Architectural design and implementation issues of the Semantic Space toolkit are discussed in detail. Finally, a case study on building a mobile situation aware phone is described to illustrate the validity of our approach and usability of the toolkit.