To realise an Ambient Intelligence environment, it is paramount that
applications can dispose of information about the context in which they
operate, preferably in a very general manner. For this purpose various types of
information should be assembled to form a representation of the context of the
device on which aforementioned applications run. To allow interoperability in
an Ambient Intelligence environment, it is necessary that the context
terminology is commonly understood by all participating devices. In this paper
we propose an adaptable and extensible context ontology for creating
context-aware computing infrastructures, ranging from small embedded devices to
high-end service platforms. The ontology has been designed to solve several key
challenges in Ambient Intelligence, such as application adaptation, automatic
code generation and code mobility, and generation of device specific user
interfaces.