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Distributed Context Retrieval and Consistency Control in Pervasive Computing

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The challenge of saturating all phases of pervasive service provision with context-aware functionality lies in coping with the complexity of maintaining, retrieving and distributing context information. To efficiently represent and query context information a sophisticated modelling scheme should exist. To distribute and synchronise context knowledge in various context repositories across a multitude of administrative domains, streamlined mechanisms are needed. This paper elaborates on an innovative context management framework that has been designed to cope with free-text and location based context retrieval and efficient context consistency control. The proposed framework has been incorporated in a multi-functional pervasive services platform, while most of the mechanisms it employs have been empirically evaluated.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been partially supported by the Integrated Project Daidalos (“Designing Advanced network Interfaces for the Delivery and Administration of Location independent, Optimised personal Services”), which is financed by the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme. However, this paper expresses the authors’ personal views, which are not necessarily those of the Daidalos consortium.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), 9 Heroon Polytechneiou Str, 157-73 Zographou, Athens, Greece

    Ioanna Roussaki Ph.D., M.S. & Maria Strimpakou

  2. Telecommunications Software & Systems Group, Waterford Institute of Technology, Waterford, Ireland

    Carsten Pils Ph.D.

Authors
  1. Ioanna Roussaki Ph.D., M.S.
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  2. Maria Strimpakou
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  3. Carsten Pils Ph.D.
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ioanna Roussaki Ph.D., M.S..

Additional information

Ioanna Roussaki received her Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1997 and her PhD in 2003 from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). Since 1999 she has been working as a researcher and lecturer in NTUA, and has participated in projects on communications, pervasive computing, context-awareness, virtual-home-environment, e-negotiations, etc.

Maria Strimpakou received her Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 2000 and is currently pursuing a PhD degree working in the Computer Networks Laboratory of NTUA. Her research interests are in the areas of context-aware systems, ontology design, distributed environments, etc.

Carsten Pils received a Dipl.-Inform. degree in 1997 and a PhD in 2005 from the Technical University RWTH Aachen, Germany. Since 2005 he has been working for the Telecommunications Software and Systems Group at the Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland. His current research interests include context-aware computing and information retrieval.

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Roussaki, I., Strimpakou, M. & Pils, C. Distributed Context Retrieval and Consistency Control in Pervasive Computing. J Netw Syst Manage 15, 57–74 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-006-9053-6

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