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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.