An Ontology-Based Context Model to manage Users Preferences and Conflicts

Abstract

In the last decade, ubiquitous computing has become an aspiration of the computing community. Nowadays, it is so profound that it is increasingly indistinguishable from the overall agenda of computing research. In ubiquitous computing, the main objective is to provide users the ability to access services and resources anytime, anywhere, in particular using Mobile Devices (MD). Applications in this domain are sensitive to the context. They have to be able to perceive this context and to adapt their behaviours by considering data that deals with the context of use and user preferences. Data about context of use provides, in particular, a conditions description (temporal, spatial, hardware, etc.) under which the user accesses Information Systems (IS). Data about user preferences aims at expressing what the user would like to obtain from the system considering different aspects (activities, display, etc.). Actually, ensuring access by nomadic users to information Systems through various devices and the adaptation of responses to nomadic users profile and context of use are two bound problems. In this paper, we attempt to answer to these problems and we propose a novel approach allowing essentially: (1) representing the context and preferences of nomadic users through ontology, to support context representation and reasoning (2) resolving conflicts that may arise between user preferences and, (3) adapting such applications to the context of use and user’s profile. The approach is supported by a visual tool we developed. A case study is presented to give more illustration.