A Context Taxonomy Supporting Public System Design

Context awareness is the basis for a system’s ability to adapt to changing conditions of its environment. This ability is especially important in the public domain where a variety of systems is used, so-called public systems. Public systems perform in public spaces and are available to all people, instead of focusing on specific user groups. They also often integrate many different devices. Thus, they need to be highly context-adaptive in many ways. However, it is very difficult to determine what context is. None of the existing definitions can serve as a guideline throughout the whole process of system development. Context relevant features need to be determined from scratch for each new system, making system design error-prone, costly and time-consuming. To support easy development of context-aware systems and applications, we propose a reusable taxonomy of context features for the public domain.