Using Private and Public Context - An Approach for Mobile Discovery and Search Services

When using context information for the customization of mobile applications, privacy issues are important as users want to limit the amount of context information that is given to service providers. Therefore, this paper distinguishes between public context that the user shares with the service provider and private context that can only be used on the mobile device for the customization of mobile applications or services. This paper illustrates how context information can be used on the mobile device for the customization of results from search/discovery services. In such services, a mobile user receives a list of search results from a service provider. The goal of the presented approach is to sort the list received from the service provider in such a way that the items which are chosen by the user are with high probability at the top of the list. We propose an adaptive optimization approach that sorts the search results with respect to the user’s context information and to previous choices made by the user. The approach considers the technical limitations of mobile devices and makes optimal use of the limited resources.