Context Awareness in Mobile Computing Environments

Abstract

Abstract. In this article, we report software architectures for context awareness in mobile computing environments, sensor centric systems and discuss context modeling issues. Defining an architecture for supporting context-aware applications for mobile devices explicitly implies a scalable description of how to represent contextual information and which are the abstraction models capable of handling such information. Using sensors to retrieve contextual information (e.g., user location) leads to a sensor network scheme that provides services to the applications level. Operations for capturing, collating, storing, and disseminating contextual information at the lowest level and aggregating it into increasingly more abstract models qualify the context-aware systems. In this article, we introduce context aware systems in mobile computing environments, review the basic mechanisms underlying the operation of such systems, and discuss notable work and important architectures in the area.

Generic Framework for Context-Aware Communication Services in Visitor’s Guides

“…Many attempts were made to provide generic infrastructure for general context aware application development (to list just a few, see [14,[19][20][21][22][23][24], some even for the specific setting of cultural heritage sites [25,26]. However, most of them focused on context modeling and infrastructure, rather than on the services themselves.…”

Agent-Based Context Consistency Management in Smart Space Environments

“…Chen [4] proposes that the OWL language can provide a uniformed solution for context representation and reasoning, knowledge sharing, and meta-language definitions. Anagnostopoulos et al [2] adopt the Description Logicas the most useful language for expressing and reasoning contextual knowledge. The OWL DL was designed to support the existing Description Logic business segment and has desirable computational properties for reasoning systems.…”

A Generalized Context-aware Architecture in Heterogeneous Mobile Computing Environments

“…The authors of [4], [5] and [6] have conducted surveys in the context-awareness domain, whereas the work documented in [2] and [3] describes middleware approaches for this area of research. The authors of [7] have reasoned a well formed generic workflow for context-aware computing.…”