The invisible integration of technology into everyday objects like home appliances,
cars and mobile phones, which is the declared vision and fundament of research in
the field of pervasive computing, leads to huge quantities of smart objects which
are situated in the surrounding physical space. Equipped with embedded systems
technology, they become increasingly heterogeneous and interconnected, raising
the challenge of a semantically meaningful interplay with each other. In this thesis,
such physical objects with embedded computing and communication technology
are referred to as digital artifacts. One approach to meet this challenge is to design
and implement systems that are able to operate autonomously in the background,
namely with as little human intervention as possible, and interact with humans in a
more unobtrusive way. In order to achieve autonomy, two aspects are particularly
important: (i) context-awareness, which refers to the ability of a digital artifact
to acquire environmental information in order to become aware of its situation
and adapt to changing situations at runtime, and (ii) context sharing, which relates
to an artifact’s ability of exchanging context information with other artifacts in
communication range.