Framework for NFC-Based Intelligent Agents: A Context-Awareness Enabler for Social Internet of Things

Context-aware applications are required to be aware of user context and ambient intelligent to support nonintrusive human-computer interaction. However, the uncertain real-world environments make it difficult for a system to perceive enough environmental contexts and achieve user's goal. Therefore, this study proposes a framework for developing an NFC-enabled intelligent agent, which combines the NFC technique with context-acquisition, ontology-knowledgebase, and semantic-adaptation modules to be aware of location, time, device, and activity contexts with respect to personal and social profiles. To cope with the uncertain environment, a credit-based incentive scheme is also proposed to encourage social cooperation and thereby enlarge the value of personal perceptions. By developing a complete ontology knowledgebase, the proposed framework can incorporate with social-cooperation schemes to recommend relevant services for supporting reactive action, proactive achievement, and social cooperation. The resultant social-advertising system shows that this framework can support a wide-range of different functionalities and is indispensable to an NFC-based intelligent agent for social Internet of things.