A study of context inference for Web-based information systems

Recently, context-awareness has been a hot topic in the ubiquitous computing field. Numerous methods for capturing, representing and inferring context have been developed and relevant projects have been performed. Existing research has tried to determine user’s contextual information physically by using stereo type cameras, RFID, smart devices, etc. These are heavily focusing on external context such as location, temperature, light, etc. However, cognitive elements of the context are important and need more study. This paper confines its research domain to the Web-based information system (IS) and, first, proposes two algorithms, the context inference algorithm and the service recommendation algorithm, for inferring cognitive context in the IS domain. Second, this paper demonstrates cognitive context-awareness on the Web-based information systems through implementing prototype deploying the proposed algorithms. The proposed system deploying the context inference and service recommendation algorithm can help the IS user to work with an IS conveniently and enable an existing IS to deliver ubiquitous service. In this fashion, we show the direction of existing IS and, ultimately, shows the typical services of a ubiquitous computing-based IS.