Context awareness

About: Context awareness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5790 publications have been published within this topic receiving 119944 citations.

Preface to the special issue on context-aware recommender systems

Abstract: Recommender systems represent a popular area of personalization technologies that has enjoyed a tremendous amount of research and development activity in both academia and industry in the last 10–15 years. Recommender systems research typically explores and develops techniques and applications for recommending various products or services to individual users based on the knowledge of users’ tastes and preferences as well as users’ past activities (such as previous purchases), which are applicable in a variety of domains and settings (Jannach et al. 2010). While a substantial amount of research has already been performed in the area of recommender systems, many existing approaches have focused on recommending the most relevant items to users and do not take into account any additional contextual information, such as time, location, weather, the user’s current goals, the user’s mood, presence of other people, or the type of the device through which the recommendation is consumed. In other words, traditionally recommender systems deal with applications having only two types of entities, users and items, and do not put them into a context when providing recommendations. However, the importance of contextual information has been recognized by researchers and practitioners in many

Pervasive computing in hospitals

Abstract: In such settings, pervasive computing concepts and technology seem to offer attractive solutions. One can easily extrapolate Weiser’s original ubiquitous computing vision into a hospital setting where pads (equivalent to PDAs), tabs (equivalent to tablet PCs), and liveboards (equivalent to interactive Smart Boards) would be available in large numbers everywhere.29 These devices would all be seamlessly connected in a wired and wireless network to provide location and context awareness, available for all to use anywhere, anytime. For example, a nurse would pick up a pad in a patient’s room and use it for small, quick jobs like documenting medicine handout; a physician would pick up a tab when arriving at the ward, be automatically identified, and then use this pad during the ward round; a radiologist would be able to access and present radiology images in medical-grade quality on an arbitrary liveboard in any of the conference and meeting rooms in the hospital; collaborative software systems for colocated and distributed cooperation regarding patients and their treatments would be available on all three devices. Location and context awareness would ensure that the proper information would be available for easy access in all places and would reduce the chances of relevant medical information being overlooked.

Context-Aware Services for Mobile Users Technology and User Experiences

Abstract: Mobile services and applications are used in varying contexts and surroundings. When the services are made context-aware, they can offer contextually relevant information to the user. This facilitates the finding of data and creates new purposes of use. The Kontti (Context-aware services for mobile users) project (January 2002 – December 2003) designed and implemented a context-aware service platform and services. The platform enables management and sharing of contexts, presence information and contextual content, and it provides context adaptation and context-aware messaging. Also, personalisation and context tools were implemented. A human-centred design approach was adopted throughout the project: the acceptance of users and service providers guided the design process from the very beginning. The developed applications were evaluated in field trials. The results provided outlines for meeting the usability challenges in context-aware services and for adapting content from one context of use to another. The results of the Kontti project indicate that the most promising applications for context-aware services are event guides and professional use. Also, conveying context information proved to be very interesting for the users. Further, contexts can be used for opening new communication channels for messaging. Context can be used as a mediator where any recipient can pick up a public message. The commercial viability of the Kontti concept was also evaluated with a round of interviews with service providers.

The MASSIF platform: a modular and semantic platform for the development of flexible IoT services

Abstract: In the Internet of Things (IoT), data-producing entities sense their environment and transmit these observations to a data processing platform for further analysis. Applications can have a notion of context awareness by combining this sensed data, or by processing the combined data. The processes of combining data can consist both of merging the dynamic sensed data, as well as fusing the sensed data with background and historical data. Semantics can aid in this task, as they have proven their use in data integration, knowledge exchange and reasoning. Semantic services performing reasoning on the integrated sensed data, combined with background knowledge, such as profile data, allow extracting useful information and support intelligent decision making. However, advanced reasoning on the combination of this sensed data and background knowledge is still hard to achieve. Furthermore, the collaboration between semantic services allows to reach complex decisions. The dynamic composition of such collaborative workflows that can adapt to the current context, has not received much attention yet. In this paper, we present MASSIF, a data-driven platform for the semantic annotation of and reasoning on IoT data. It allows the integration of multiple modular reasoning services that can collaborate in a flexible manner to facilitate complex decision-making processes. Data-driven workflows are enabled by letting services specify the data they would like to consume. After thorough processing, these services can decide to share their decisions with other consumers. By defining the data these services would like to consume, they can operate on a subset of data, improving reasoning efficiency. Furthermore, each of these services can integrate the consumed data with background knowledge in its own context model, for rapid intelligent decision making. To show the strengths of the platform, two use cases are detailed and thoroughly evaluated.

CARED-SOA: A Context-Aware Event-Driven Service-Oriented Architecture

Abstract: Currently, context awareness has become essential in software applications and services owing to the high demand by users, especially for mobile computing applications. This need to provide context awareness requires a software infrastructure not only to receive context information but also to make use of it so that it provides advantageous services that may be customized according to user needs. In this paper, we provide an event-driven service-oriented architecture supported by an enterprise service bus, which will facilitate the incorporation of Internet of Things data and provide real-time context-aware services. The result, which has been validated through a real-world case study, is a scalable context-aware architecture which can be applied in a wide spectrum of domains.