Providing multilayered context for building smart home

Ubiquitous computing supports context-aware applications under smart environment. Currently, generality, reusability, and simple query mechanism of the context are issued to realize the context-awareness. In this work, a well-structured architecture to support context-awareness, namely context engine, is designed. For this goal, multilayered contexts which consist of raw context, general context, application specific context, and inferred context, are defined to provide the generality of the context engine, and several components are composed to support the context-aware applications efficiently. The evaluation shows the generality of the proposed context engine is quite applicable to the smart home environment. Keywords: Context engine, context-awareness, smart home, ubiquitous computing.