Context integration for mobile data tailoring

Independent, heterogeneous, distributed, sometimes transient and mobile data sources produce an enormous amount of information that should be semantically integrated and filtered, or, as we say, tailored, based on the user’s interests and context. Since both the user and the data sources can be mobile, and the communication might be unreliable, caching the information on the user device may become really useful. Therefore new challenges have to be faced such as: data filtering in a context-aware fashion, integration of not-known-in-advance data sources, automatic extraction of the semantics. We propose a novel system named Context-ADDICT (Context-Aware Data Design, Integration, Customization and Tailoring) able to deal with the described scenario. The system we are designing aims at tailoring the available information to the needs of the current user in the current context, in order to offer a more manageable amount of information; such information is to be cached on the user’s device according to policies defined at design-time, to cope with data source transiency. This paper focuses on the information representation and tailoring problem and on the definition of the global architecture of the system.