Mobile Context-Aware Systems: Technologies, Resources and Applications

Abstract

Mobile applications often adapt their behavior according to user context, however, they are often limited to consider few sources of contextual information, such as user position or language. This article reviews existing work in context-aware systems (CAS), e.g., how to model context, and discusses further development of CAS and its potential applications by looking at available information, methods and technologies. Social Media seems to be an interesting source of personal information when appropriately exploited. In addition, there are many types of general information, ranging from weather and public transport to information of books and museums. These information sources can be combined in previously unexplored ways, enabling the development of smarter mobile services in different domains. Users are, however, reluctant to provide their personal information to applications; therefore, there is a crave for new regulations and systems that allow applications to use such contextual data without compromising the user privacy.

Towards a New Perspective of Building Tools for Context-Aware Mobile Applications

“…Sometimes, these development environments only bring support to embed physical sensors inside the generated applications such as JBoss. However, it is important to know that there are other ways to set context-feature values as described in [ 27 ]; the sensors could be of different types, for example, physical, virtual (using applications and services), direct user input, etc. Each of them has its own configuration and way of execution.…”

“…Sometimes, these development environments only bring support to embed physical sensors inside the generated applications such as JBoss. However, there are other ways to set contextfeature values, for example, using applications, services or direct user input as it is described in [27]. Therefore, there are different kinds of sensors, in [27] are listed as physical, virtual, direct user input, etc.…”

Variability Features in Building Approaches for Context-Aware Mobile Applications

“…According to what is detailed in [11], the sensors can be of different types, for example, physical, virtual (using applications and services), direct user input, etc. Each of them has its own configuration and way of execution.…”

Mobile Learning Applications: Exploring Location Sensing Mechanisms

“…Mobile Applications have been growing over the last years due to technological improvement [1]. Nowadays, there are different kinds of mobile applications, those that consider user's location to provide information or services according to his/her location are called Location-based Applications.…”

“…However, indirect mechanisms require users interact in some way, as for example, QR codes [6] which need users read explicitly the code with their mobile devices. On the other hand, according to [1], contextual data (which include user's location) could be collected in different ways: physical sensors (e.g. GPS and QR code reader), digital sensors (as the calendar of mobile devices), social networks or be input manually by users.…”