ubiES: Applying ubiquitous computing technologies to an expert system for context-aware proactive services

Abstract

Expert systems are originally designed to generate feasible alternatives in an automated manner. Users expect these systems to help them proactively and intelligently make decisions by automatically detecting users' various context data. However, conventional expert systems seldom automatically refer to context data, which is indispensable for proactive and intelligent problem solving. Therefore, this paper proposes a method to automatically detect and utilize users' context data for expert systems using ubiquitous computing technologies. To do so, we propose an amended expert systems paradigm, context-knowledge-dialogue-data (CKDD). Under the CKDD paradigm, we construct the framework of a ubiquitous computing technology-based expert system (ubiES), with the description of the subsystems within. To show the feasibility of the ubiES framework proposed in this paper, a prototype system, context-aware multi-agent system-my optimization (CAMA-myOpt), has been implemented in PDA-based proactive services area such as contextaware comparative shopping. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.