Ontology-based approach for context modeling in enterprise applications

Today, enterprise applications provide large amounts of data and finding the right information on time for a given purpose is often a challenge. In these environments, users do not know what information is important, why it is important and finally, how to find this important information. Therefore, an enterprise application has to decide which information is,relevant in certain a situation for certain a user. In order to accomplish that, the context of the information must be taken to account. Moreover, this application must be able to capture the context of the application user as well as the overall business context which describes the situation in which information is relevant. In this paper we propose an ontology-based context model which captures the general concepts about user and business context. Also, we discuss the challenges for context reasoning and interpreting and we present a case study to demonstrate the benefits of the developed concepts. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.