Abstract
Capturing, maintaining, and using context information helps mobile applications provide better services and generates data useful in specifying information sharing policies. Obtaining the full benefit of context information requires a rich and expressive representation that is grounded in shared semantic models. We summarize some of our past work on representing and using context models and briefly describe Triveni, a system for cross-device context discovery and enrichment. Triveni represents context in RDF and OWL and reasons over context models to infer additional information and detect and resolve ambiguities and inconsistencies. A unique feature, its ability to create and manage “contextual groups” of users in an environment, enables their members to share context information using wireless ad-hoc networks. Thus, it enriches the information about a user’s context by creating mobile ad hoc knowledge networks.