User‐sensitive and quality‐driven discovery of context information for the successful delivery of context‐aware services

The successful provision of context‐awareness in pervasive environments requires the support of autonomic management facilities that provide ways to efficiently acquire and use contextual information. This paper claims that in order to offer viable context‐aware services, the issue of context imperfection and aging as well as the alignment of the context information that is used by a service with the customized service objectives should be taken into account. It presents an approach for managing the selection of context sources considering the freshness and actuality of the available information, and dynamically adapting to any source change and failure. Accordingly, there is no need to know beforehand the context sources to obtain the required information, but a quality‐aware discovery of the sources is envisioned. Finally, the proposed approach allows services to be ported easily to an environment with a different set of context sources.