Architectural Aspects for Context Exploitation in Information Fusion

This chapter describes a proposed architecture to integrate context sources in fusion processes in a general way, so that any fusion system in which contextual knowledge is available can be developed following this architecture. We introduce some architectural concepts to be considered in the development of fusion systems including contextual knowledge. The two basic concepts in the chapter are context access through middleware, and a multilevel adaptation mechanism following the JDL data fusion model reference. The chapter is written at a general level, so that context input is abstracted as a service and the “middleware” concept is exploited.