Towards Context-Awareness in Ubiquitous Computing
Future ubiquitous computing has accelerated the need of context-awareness that leverages information about surrounding situation so as to adapt applications. There is considerable interest in context-awareness, and many prototypes have been proposed, whic
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Abstract. Future ubiquitous computing has accelerated the need of context-awareness that leverages information about surrounding situation so as to adapt applications. There is considerable interest in context-awareness, and many prototypes have been proposed, which have demonstrated the potential of context-aware applications. That notwithstanding, these kinds of systems are known to be difficult to design, develop and maintain. This paper considers these difficulties as it discusses the core issues of context-aware computing, including definition of context, techniques of acquiring, modeling and adapting to contextual information. It intends to provide the community with a comprehensive and detailed view of current state of the art. Keywords: Context-Awareness, Ubiquitous Computing, Context Definition, Context Acquisition, Context Modeling, Context-aware Adaptation.
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Introduction
The need for context-awareness, which leverages information about surrounding situation so as to adapt applications, has been accelerated by the vision of ubiquitous computing. Computing devices in ubiquitous computing environment now exhibit a high degree of mobility and their computational systems must adapt to heterogeneous and dynamic surrounding environment where they are within. At the same time, more and more everyday devices, such as digital cameras and watches, are now equipped with computing capabilities, so that applications in ubiquitous computing environment need to take into account the attributes of different devices, which otherwise will result in unsatisfactory user experience. Due to the interest of context-awareness, many research works have been proposed in this area [1][2][3][4][5]. These prototypes have demonstrated the potential of context-aware applications, but have also shown that designing, developing and maintaining these kinds of systems are still extremely difficult, to say the least. Lots of technical challenges remain to be addressed before even simple context-aware systems can be widely and realistically developed. In particular, every context-aware application needs to consider four basic issues: what is context, how to acquire them, how to represent them, and how to adapt to them. This paper discusses these core issues of context-aware computing, and T.-W. Kuo et al. (Eds.): EUC 2007, LNCS 4808, pp. 706–717, 2007. c IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007
Towards Context-Awareness in Ubiquitous Computing
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intends to provide the community with a comprehensive and detailed view of current state of the art. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: In section 2, we review definitions of context and present our own definition from an application point of view. Section 3 focuses on currently available context acquisition techniques for context-aware applications. Section 4 discusses several basic technical aspects of context models including data structure, integrity and manipulation. In section 5, we detail various design concerns of context-aware adaptation. Section 6 con
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