A Context-Aware Architecture for Mobile Knowledge Management

In many professional activities (e.g., medical diagnosis, construction, or sales), the ability to retrieve and store knowledge in a mobile situation is crucial. This need, together with the progress of mobile devices, has led to the emergence of mobile knowledge management. The mobile situation imposes specific constraints on traditional knowledge management activities (e.g., knowledge retrieval or presentation). Therefore, a key research question for mobile knowledge management is how context should be taken into account. In this paper, we propose a context-aware knowledge management architecture for mobile environments. The key aspect is the “Contextualizer” middleware that takes care of knowledge storage and retrieval as well as contextually adapted knowledge presentation on mobile devices. In contrast to existing concepts, we suggest a broader approach, where the middleware serves as the mediator to different mobile devices. We implemented the architecture in a fitted use case. Our roadside assistance use case demonstrates the architecture’s strength for presenting both text and graphics stemming from several knowledge sources.