Context awareness

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

A context awareness architecture for facilitating mobile learning

Abstract: The MOBIlearn project (EU IST-2001-37187) aims to support a wide range of services and applications for learners using mobile computing devices such as phones, PDAs, and laptops The display limitations of these devices mean that it is crucial to deliver the right content at the right time One way of doing this is to use contextual information to derive content that is relevant to what the user is doing, as well as where and how they are doing it We present an object-oriented, feature-based architecture for a context awareness subsystem to be implemented within the MOBIlearn project, and consider the implications involved in the use of such a system for mobile learning

EgoSpaces: facilitating rapid development of context-aware mobile applications

Abstract: Today's mobile applications require constant adaptation to their changing environments, or contexts. Technological advances have increased the pervasiveness of mobile computing devices such as laptops, handhelds, and embedded sensors. The sheer amount of context information available for adaptation places a heightened burden on application developers as they must manage and utilize vast amounts of data from diverse sources. Facilitating programming in this data-rich environment requires a middleware that provides context information to applications in an abstract form. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of such a middleware that allows programmers to focus on high-level interactions among programs and to employ declarative abstract context specifications in settings that exhibit transient interactions with opportunistically encountered components. We also discuss the novel context-aware abstractions the middleware provides and the programming knowledge necessary to write applications using it. Finally, we provide examples demonstrating the infrastructure's ability to support differing tasks from a wide variety of application domains

A Survey on Context-Aware Mobile and Wireless Networking: On Networking and Computing Environments' Integration

Abstract: During the last years, a continuous convergence and fusion of computing and networking systems is stressed in the ICT research community. Context awareness appears to be a major research "glue-point" of such kind of heterogeneous environments' integration. In this survey paper, we aim to assemble all the "puzzle-pieces" of the emerging research area of Context Aware Mobile and Wireless Networking (CAMoWiN) in order to provide the reader a holistic representation of the work having been done in the past emphasizing in recent research efforts. A precise definition of abstract Context Aware (CA) functionalities together with a clear classification of related state-of-the-art proposals are provided in the form of a proposed taxonomy scheme per CA functionality. Each taxonomy scheme can also serve as a sufficiently general framework permitting the easy classification of novel CAMoWiN solutions emerging in the near future. Therefore, our study not only defines all the possible components of a CAMoWiN architecture and clearly points out the similarities and differences of all research efforts in the field but also evaluates future research trends and paves the way for the researchers to work beyond the concepts investigated in this work. Finally, apart from identifying the open challenges, which arise when applying traditional concepts of pervasive computing to mobile and wireless networks, we further map them to the Mobile Cloud Computing paradigm, whose concepts appear to be very promising regarding next generation networking and computing environments' integration.

Context attributes: an approach to enable context-awareness for service discovery

Abstract: The service discovery problem has attracted a lot of attention from researchers and practitioners. Jini, SLP, and UPnP are among the few emerging service discovery protocols. Although they seem to provide a good solution to the problem, there is an unaddressed need of more sophisticated location and context-aware service selection support. In this paper, we introduce the concept of context attribute as an effective, flexible means to exploit relevant context information during the service discovery process. Context attributes can express context information including service-specific selection logic, client, and network condition. We describe our approach and implementation, and present experimental results of our context-aware service discovery implementation.

The design and applications of a context service

Abstract: Context awareness enables applications to adapt themselves to their computing environment in order to better suit the needs of the user and the tasks. This paper describes a general middleware infrastructure for context collection and dissemination, realized as a Context Service. By way of two example applications, this paper also illustrates how context information provided by our context service can be exploited to enhance the user experience. These two applications are built upon the abstraction provided by the Context Service and thus help validate the design of this service. The first application, a Notification Dispatcher, uses context to route messages to the most appropriate communication device for a recipient. The second application, a context-aware content distribution system, uses context to predict users' access to web content, and uses these predictions to pre-process and pre-distribute content in order to reduce the access latency.