QACA: Quality assured context acquisition in context-aware computing

Abstract

Previous research work in context quality primarily focuses on identifying and modeling it. However, assuring context quality is no less challenging than modeling it. Difficulties lie in acquiring high-quality context from the context providers whose quality and availability can not be guaranteed. In this paper, we propose a context quality assurance strategy QACA based on the least square error, by leveraging the redundancy of context providers. In this strategy, redundant imprecise and unstable context providers are used to constitute a more precise and stable context provision. Such a strategy provides a theoretical basis to implement a specification based context acquisition middleware.