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The rapid advances in the technologies of mobile computing and wireless communications have facilitated the use of applications and services on handheld devices. Sharing of living experience (SOLE) is one such service, through which users can share their experience of daily activities such as shopping, entertainment, and traveling. This paper seeks to study SOLE in more detail.

The paper presents an application framework for a context‐aware SOLE which considers location, preferences, and other useful information for a seamless user experience. SOLE leverages on the service‐oriented middleware, Coalition. Entities of interest are represented as services registered with Coalition, which are organized using location information. This facilitates location‐based selection of entities for associating or retrieving experiences. In addition, Coalition incorporates the contexts of users in the discovery and delivery of experience information. Besides, to cater for resource constraints of mobile devices, the concept of “proxy” is introduced.

A detailed study of SOLE, namely, its design as well as its interaction with the middleware, information providers and information consumers, is provided. As a proof of concept, a prototype of SOLE for mobile phone users is also provided. The experiments show the ease of using SOLE and its acceptable performance in practice.

SOLE is generic and scalable, by not assuming a specific application scenario; flexible, by allowing the user to choose where to store the experience data and to specify his audience; and context‐aware by considering the contexts of the user such as location and preferences in the experience sharing process.

The rapid proliferation of mobile context aware applications has resulted in an increased research interest towards developing specialized context data management strategies for mobile entities. The purpose of this paper is to aim to develop a new way to model mobile entities and manage their contexts accordingly.

This paper proposes the concept of “Mobile Space” to model mobile entities and presents strategies to manage the various contexts associated therein. To handle availability related issues, two system services are designed: the “Availability Updating Service” which is an identifier based mechanism and is designed to keep track of mobile objects and handle availability related issues, and the “Application Callback Service” which is a publish/subscribe based mechanism to handle application disruptions and interruptions arising due to mobility.

The paper presents a detailed study of the proposed framework and a description of the underlying services and the components therein to validate the framework. Experimental results carried out in WiFi and 3G environments indicate that the proposed techniques can support mobile applications and minimize application disruptions with minimal overhead.

The proposed context management framework is generic in nature and is not designed for a specific class of applications. Any mobile context aware application can leverage on the framework and utilize the provided functionalities to manage application disruptions. Also, the decoupling of mobile application layer and the underlying context data management layer renders context data management layer transparent to the application design.

Despite several efforts during the last years, the web model and semantic web technologies have not yet been successfully applied to empower Ubiquitous Computing architectures in order to create knowledge‐rich environments populated by interconnected smart devices. In this paper we point out some problems of these previous initiatives and introduce SoaM (Smart Objects Awareness and Adaptation Model), an architecture for designing and seamlessly deploying web‐powered context‐aware semantic gadgets. Implementation and evaluation details of SoaM are also provided in order to identify future research challenges.

In this paper, we describe a novel approach for ontology distribution in ubiquitous environments. We present the Context Aware Explorer (CAE) framework we have developed which allows building context aware applications. Our approach, while built upon Web Ontology Language OWL and RDF Schema, is aiming at modeling context ontology for supporting context reasoning and the design of a Smart Rule Engine that maintains a shared model of context for all computing entities in the smart space. The CAE main contribution is its ability to distribute ontology based on abstract parameters related to situation and to user profile. The ultimate goal is to decrease the response time of the reasoning engine with regards to reasoning accuracy. We also describe the implementation of CAE, and its associated ontology, in a prototype demonstrator of smart environment handling indoor and outdoor context aware services. The validation of the ontology distribution approach was applied to assistive environment dedicated to people having motor disabilities and tested within laboratory conditions. Preliminary performance results are presented to highlight the impact of distributed ontology concept.