The Ambient Intelligence (AmI) vision implies the concept of “smart spaces” populated by intelligent entities. While most
implementations focus strictly on local applications of “AmI”, we think of an AmI scenario as a federation of instances of
local and application AmI domains. In order to deal with distributed context handling in AmI domains, we propose a context
model suitable for distributed context acquisition, reasoning and delivery to applications. We propose a hybrid approach,
which aims at combining the advantages of object-oriented models for distributed context handling and those of ontology-based
models for context reasoning. We have applied this model to the development of a context-aware eTourism application. This
application aims at providing tourists with context-aware services supporting communication and knowledge exchange. It integrates
already available location-based content delivery services with a context-aware instant messaging service and a provider reputation
service. Here we describe main design issues and prototype implementation.
Keywords context-awareness - context modeling - ontology - eTourism