iConAwa – An intelligent context-aware system

► iConAwa is a context-aware and multiagent system. ► Context-aware systems are suitable for agent-based development. ► Context and points of interest are modelled in an extensible way by the developed ontology models. ► Context reasoning provides derivation of high level context from low level context. ► Context reasoning is decoupled from the source code by rule-based reasoning. Context-awareness becomes an increasingly important concept in the development of mobile and ubiquitous systems. Applications and services, which run in these kinds of highly dynamic environments, should be aware of and adapt to their contexts. Context-aware applications improve and enrich people’s interactions with devices, computers and other people. In this paper, design and development of iConAwa, which is an intelligent context-aware multi-agent system proactively providing mobile users with context-aware information and services, is described. In iConAwa, mobile users can get information and services about nearby resources (attraction points) according to their context and also communicate with each other by exchanging messages. Context and point of interest ontologies are developed in OWL. Context and points of interest are modelled in a flexible and extensible way by the developed ontology models. Knowledge sharing and knowledge reuse are also provided by using these ontology models. iConAwa makes use of rule-based context reasoning which provides derivation of high level implicit context from low level explicit context. With this approach context reasoning is decoupled from the source code of the system. JADE agent development framework is used to develop the agents and Jena semantic web framework is used to manipulate ontologies and for rule based reasoning.