An Architecture for Context-Sensitive Telecommunication Applications

Nowadays, everybody utilizes information from different sources and services from various providers. However, one must know how to find the interesting information and how to access services. Wouldnt it be better if information and service access could adapt to the user and his interests? This approach is the central point of the ubiquitous computing research. And the adaptation is done based on the current context describing the user and his equipment. Although there are many projects that claim to be context sensitive, a general architecture for context-sensitive applications has not yet been introduced. This paper closes this gap and describes an architecture that has been developed for assisting handicapped tourists during their holidays in the Thuringian Forest. However, this architecture can easily be generalized for any context-sensitive telecommunication application, because it gives a well-defined and flexible model for context information and defines several processes to gather, transfer, process and apply context information.