A dynamic context management infrastructure for supporting user-driven web integration in the personal web

Abstract

Most web applications deliver personalized features by making decisions on behalf of the user. Thus, the user's web experience is still a fractionated process due to a lack of user-centric web integration. In contrast, smarter web applications will empower the user to control the integration of web resources according to personal concerns. Moreover, as the user's situation and web resources continuously evolve, web infrastructures supporting smarter applications require dynamic and efficient mechanisms to represent, gather, provide, and reason about context information. Aiming at optimizing the user's web experience, this paper proposes a self-adaptive context management infrastructure, and an extensible context taxonomy based on the resource description framework (RDF). Our context manager is able to deploy new context management components to keep track of changes in the user's situation at run-time. Our taxonomy includes a set of inference rules for supporting dynamic context representation and reasoning. Using a smarter commerce case study, we illustrate the application of feedback loops and semantic web, to the realization of dynamic context management in the personal web.