ADDRESSING INCONSISTENCIES OF CONTEXT IN CONTEXT-AWARE APPLICATIONS

Abstract

The advent of computer has brought drastic changes in the technology utilization in a very little time. Traditional working mechanisms are fading out with the emergence of autonomic and ubiquitous systems. Context has been foundational stone in catering the day to day seamless environmental needs. Consideration of automatic adaptation is being understood and used in the routine application development paradigms. So the need to obtain good quality context has emerged with ever increasing existence of pervasive computing environments. Escape from such environments is impossible in this era of IOT (Internet of Things) where almost everything even time and location are treated as contexts. Bad quality contexts also known as inconsistent contexts are great threat to the sustainability and persistence of pervasive computing applications. Inconsistency is generated when duplicate sensing devices report variable outputs. Such improbable results can bring contextual application crashes extending monetary as well as error recovery loss. To address this issue, the concept of constraints / rules has been proposed for consistency checking and various methods for contextual correction are proposed. But still endeavours are needed to attain optimal context inconsistency resolutions. Our work is one of the efforts to mitigate this issue of context inconsistency resolution and to attain optimal context quality so that persistence and sustainability of context aware applications may be maintained.