Ruaidhrí Power

Topic Maps for Context Management

Knowledge and Data Engineering Group
Department of Computer Science
Trinity College Dublin

The advent of context-aware computing requires a new paradigm in information management. Context information in a computing environment will take the form of disparate and often heterogenous information objects distributed about the network. This paper contends that topic maps are a useful tool to provide a high-level framework for the management of the interconnection of these information objects. This can be achieved by using a ‘dynamic’ topic map to overlay a management structure on the information, resulting in an extremely powerful way of representing knowledge in a context-aware environment. Individual topic maps can be combined to provide a global view of the context information space, and this paper explores this idea to provide intersmart space management. Certain extensions to topic maps are also proposed, to provide useful services for context systems. An example of such a service is an ‘aggregation service’ which would take information objects from a number of sensors and derive new context information from them.