An Intelligent Broker for Context-Aware Systems

We describe Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA) – a new architecture for supporting context-aware systems in smart spaces. Our architecture explores the use of Semantic Web languages for defining and publishing a context ontology, for sharing information about a context and for reasoning over such information. Central to our architecture is a broker agent that maintains a shared model of the context for all computing entities in the space and enforces the privacy policies defined by the users and devices. We also describe the use of CoBrA in prototyping an intelligent meeting room.