Patent ID: 7392247

Claim:
A method for fusing context data comprising the steps of: (a) receiving context data including one or more context values from a plurality of information sources; (b) computing a quality measure for each context value; (c) organizing context values into one or more clusters, at least one of the clusters having a plurality of context values, and assigning a single context value and a single quality measure to each of said clusters; (d) selecting one or more clusters from said clusters according to one or more criteria; and (e) aggregating the assigned single context values and quality measures of said selected one or more clusters to generate a single representative context value and single representative quality measure, wherein said single representative context value and single representative quality measure are usable by a context aware application to avoid conflict and ambiguity among different information sources providing said context data, further comprising the steps of guiding clustering, selecting and aggregating operations used in generating said single representative context value, said guiding performed according to a respective clustering policy, selection policy, and aggregation policy, wherein a selection policy implements a step of selecting according to sum of areas of all context values divided by minimum bounding box of all context values in the cluster.