Abstract
In human to human communication, context increases the ability to convey ideas. However, in human to application and application to application communication, this property is difficult to attain. Context-awareness becomes an emergent need to achieve the goal of delivering more user-centric personalized services, especially in ubiquitous environments. However, there is no agreed-upon generic framework that can be reused by deployed applications to support context-awareness. In this paper, a defeasible logic-based framework for context-awareness is proposed that can enhance the functionality of any deployed application. The nonmonotonic nature of defeasible logic has the capability of attaining justifiable decisions in dynamic environments. Classical defeasible logic is extended by meta-rules to increase its expressiveness power, facilitate its representation of complex multi-context systems, and permit distributed reasoning. The framework is able to produce justified decisions depending on both the basic functionality of the system that is itself promoted by contextual knowledge and any cross-cutting concerns that might be added by different authorities or due to further improvements to the system. Active concerns that are triggered at certain contexts are encapsulated in separate defeasible theories. A proof theory is defined along with a study of its formal properties. The framework is applied to a motivating scenario to approve its feasibility and the conclusions are analyzed using argumentation as an approach of reasoning.
Highlights
It is fair to say that the ubiquitous computing paradigm revolutionized our understanding of computing and what it can deliver
The significance of the study lies in its conceptual analysis of context by considering it to be both, information that can characterize entities and information that has the ability to characterize a whole new behavior of the system. Another advancement of the framework is that it permits distributed reasoning which is a challenging area in AI, as there is no central authority to control the context flow in the overall system, but rather each component in the system is allowed to add its own view of manipulating contextual knowledge
The theoretical importance lies in the proposed extension to the defeasible theory that permits the representation of complex multi-context systems and facilitates distributed reasoning, while empirical significance lies in the ability to employ the framework to contextualize any kind of application
Summary
King Abdullah II School for Information Technology University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan. There is no agreed-upon generic framework that can be reused by deployed applications to support context-awareness. A defeasible logic-based framework for contextawareness is proposed that can enhance the functionality of any deployed application. The nonmonotonic nature of defeasible logic has the capability of attaining justifiable decisions in dynamic environments. Classical defeasible logic is extended by meta-rules to increase its expressiveness power, facilitate its representation of complex multi-context systems, and permit distributed reasoning. The framework is able to produce justified decisions depending on both the basic functionality of the system that is itself promoted by contextual knowledge and any crosscutting concerns that might be added by different authorities or due to further improvements to the system. Active concerns that are triggered at certain contexts are encapsulated in separate defeasible theories.
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