Towards an extensible context ontology for ambient intelligence

Abstract. To realise an Ambient Intelligence environment, it is para-mount that applications can dispose of information about the context in which they operate, preferably in a very general manner. For this purpose various types of information should be assembled to form a representa-tion of the context of the device on which aforementioned applications run. To allow interoperability in an Ambient Intelligence environment, it is necessary that the context terminology is commonly understood by all participating devices. In this paper we propose an adaptable and extensible context ontology for creating context-aware computing infras-tructures, ranging from small embedded devices to high-end service plat-forms. The ontology has been designed to solve several key challenges in Ambient Intelligence, such as application adaptation, automatic code generation and code mobility, and generation of device specific user in-terfaces.