Keara Barrett, Ruaidhri Power

State of the Art: Context Management

The main objective of ubiquitous computing is to decrease the effort required to exploit computing to aid human activities.

"Ubiquitous computing has as its goal the enhancing computer use by making many computers available throughout the physical environment, but making them effectively invisible to the user"
(Weiser 1993).

Furthermore if the user wishes to extract the maximum benefit from the computing environment, the associated systems and services must cooperate and integrate their information and the general information about the situation in which the user wishes the carry out the task. This information about the user’s situation is called context. Humans have always used situational information, or context, to make inter-personal interactions richer. If computers use context while interacting with humans, they can offer more useful services and information to humans than is possible without the application of context. The main challenge with computers using context while interacting with humans, is that there is no standard, reusable model that can be used to handle context.

Computers are separated from the reality around them, limited to the explicit input that they receive from their environment. This can lead to differences between what the computer attempts to do and what the user wishes to do, because the computer may not be given enough information to recognise what the user aims to do. Giving computers more information about the world in which we live and work will enable them to assist in our daily lives. The field of context management attempts to address the difficulty of using context in computing by proposing context information that can be extracted from different computing situations. By supplying context information to applications involved, the user experience can be enhanced and new applications can be produced.

The main propose of this paper is to investigate the use and management of context in a system and to examine the components needed to create a proficient context management system. This paper introduces the notion of context, the element of a context-aware system and context management. Benefits and possible uses of context are described and an overview of some existing context-aware systems is given. The remainder of the paper is organised as follows. Section 2 presents an overview of both context and context-aware computing. In Section 3 context is classified, characteristics of context are outlined, elements and features of context-aware computing and context-aware systems are discussed and management models are outlined and compared. Section 3 also discusses some uses of context, it examines privacy as it applies to context, and finally examples of context-aware systems are outlined. The paper concludes with Section 4, which talks about future work in the area of context management.