ABSTRACT
Context-awareness is the basis for efficient software adaptation. An adequate context model can greatly facilitate the adaptation process. Due to the importance of context in distributed systems, context modeling is an active research subject in many areas, such as pervasive computing and autonomic computing. This chapter introduces some representative ontology models, including Context Broker Architecture, GLObal Smart Space, Aspect-Scale-Context, and Service-Oriented Context-Aware Middleware. The architecture ontology specifies the control over the evolution processes targeting the requirement goals. Consequently, there are three architecture ontologies respectively: architecture description ontology (ADO), architecture manipulation ontology (AMO), and architecture control ontology. ADO corresponds to the general architecture description languages and mainly describes the static configuration of the architectures. AMO defines the actions to operate on the architectures. ACO associates AMO with ADO by specifying when to carry out the actions in AMO to manipulate the architectures described with ADO.
