Context-Aware Systems and Implications for Future Internet

by Nigel Baker et al.

The article presents a vision how context can make network services more personalised and useful.

The authors define context awareness as the capability of an application of being aware of its physical environment or situation and responding accordingly. Context, therefore, includes factors such as location, presence, temperature, light, important events, etc. Based on this definition the authors distinguish between adaptable systems (which empower users to customize these systems) and adaptive systems, which proactively adapt to their environment.

Interesting Ideas/Concepts/Challenges

• Hard-wired context capabilities versus an extensible framework (knowledge based infrastructure)
• Large scale context aware systems (context acquisition, dissemination, ..)
• Generic model: context producer-consumer, publish-subscribe (to context), broker model
• Consider context on media coverage to distinguish chatter from profound trends
• distributed systems (no central node/authority); ad-hoc composition
• privacy

Example Application TeamLife, which contextualizes photos with context taken from address books, google calendar, location, network characteristics, ...