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Pervasive computing systems that strive to be minimally intrusive and exhibit inherent proactiveness and dynamic adaptability to the user preferences and environment need to be context-aware. Contextawareness provides computing environments with the ability to adapt the services or content they provide, by implicitly sensing and automatically deriving the users' needs from the context that surrounds them, making services more attentive, responsive and predictive. This paper is concerned with the development of an ambient context management system that aims to maximize the automation of the complete context knowledge lifecycle via the establishment of a flexible prototype context ontology 1 .

Web Services (WSs) are a new breed of web application that have brought out quite challenging research issues. One of these is the establishment of an interoperable semantic framework suitable to represent all potential features of WSs. Apart from the functional properties that have already been modeled via standardized tools, there are also the nonfunctional features of WSs i.e. their

Abstract. Services in pervasive computing systems must evolve so that they become minimally intrusive and exhibit inherent proactiveness and dynamic adaptability to the current conditions, user preferences and environment. Context awareness has the potential to greatly reduce the human attention and interaction bottlenecks, to give the user the impression that services fade into the background, and to support intelligent personalization and adaptability features. To establish this functionality, an infrastructure is required to collect, manage, maintain, synchronize, infer and disseminate context information towards applications and users. This paper presents a context model and ambient context management system that have been integrated into a pervasive service platform. This research is being carried out in the DAIDALOS IST Integrated Project for pervasive environments. The final goal is to integrate the platform developed with a heterogeneous all-IP network, in order to provide intelligent pervasive services to mobile and non-mobile users based on a robust context-aware environment.