Context awareness systems, a subcategory of intelligent systems, are concerned with suggesting relevant products/services to users' situations as smart services. One key element for improving smart services' quality is to organize and manipulate contextual data in an appropriate manner to facilitate knowledge generation from these data. In this light, a knowledge-based approach, can be used as a key component in context-aware systems. Context awareness and knowledge-based systems, in fact, have been gaining prominence in their respective domains for decades. However, few studies have focused on how to reconcile the two fields to maximize the benefits of each field. For this reason, the objective of this paper is to present a literature review of how contextaware systems, with a focus on the knowledge-based approach, have recently been conceptualized to promote further research in this area. In the end, the implications and current challenges of the study will be discussed.