Modelling Contextual Data for Smart Environments. Case Study of a System to Support Mountain Rescuers

Context-aware pervasive systems are complex, due to the need to gather detailed environmental information and to perform a variety of context reasoning processes in order to adapt behaviours accordingly. These operations are merged seamlessly. We show the feasibility and vitality of a fully designed system for mountain rescue operations, with various aspects of the contextual processing in middleware, as well as analyse its context life cycle. The system is verified through intensive experiments with a rich set of categorised context data. The contextual processing is shown in different weather scenarios. The service is geared towards software development, converging IoT (Internet of Things) and cloud computing with specific reference to smart application scenarios.