A Context Retrieval Method for Context-awareness Using Ontology-Based Approach in Internet of Things Environments

A context-aware system is required for providing context-aware services to users in the Internet of things (IoT) environment. It consists of three primary tasks: gathering context data, abstracting the collected data, and providing services to users. In IoT environments, context data are generated by a large number of sensors, and this context data are part of the context-awareness services provided to the users. When the context-aware system provides context-aware services with their service descriptions, it is necessary to process the data gathered by abstracting and contextualizing them. Generally, the context-aware system encounters a problem in that the context representations between contextualized sensor data and their related service descriptions do not match well. We herein propose a context retrieval method that facilitates in obtaining context information for the context-aware system in IoT environments. The context-aware system communicates with an ontology module that handles input data described in a set of universal resource identifiers, as a triplet. The ontology module resolves each representation request from the context-aware system. The proposed method provides an ontology-based mapping procedure for the context representation problem described above