The acceptance and usability of context-aware systems have given them the edge of wide use in various domains and has also attracted the attention of researchers in the area of context-aware computing. Making user context information available to such systems is the center of attention. However, there is very little emphasis given to the process of context representation and context fusion whic...

Explanations play an important part in the interaction with any intelligent system. This is particular important in context-aware and social awareness systems that regularly assume responsibility for a user and act proactively. Explanations are often generated using all available information. However, privacy issues in context-aware systems might dictate a limited distribution of information. T...

Ubiquitous computing environment consists of diverse range of hardware and software entities, and is about the interactivity of such entities. Context-awareness, being an important ingredient plays a vital role in enabling such interactive smart environments. The entities and contextual information provided/utilized by them must have invariant meanings in order to have a common understanding am...

Context-aware services adapt to ever-changing environments and therefore face the challenge to acquire context information in a priori unknown situations. They rely on other services (e.g. for context acquisition) and failures of these services may occur. In this paper we introduce concepts for the CoCo Infrastructure in order to deal with services that fail to deliver requested context informa...

The production of smart, seamless and economical devices has paved the way for the development of context aware systems. Context awareness allows a system to classify the current activity based on the context as measured by the sensors present in the devices. With the presence of multiple devices and services in the environment security threats are expected. The threats can be modelled during t...

This paper presents an analysis of the potential and a methodology for handling context events and adaptations in maintenance services. A significant number of industrial IT systems employ data models and service frameworks whose design specifications where drafted on the basis of functional requirements for non context-aware systems. Such systems were modular in nature but little care was take...

Today’s context-aware systems tend to be reactive or ‘pull’ based the user requests or queries for some information and the system responds with the requested information. However, none of the systems anticipate the user’s intent and behavior, or take into account his current events and activities to pro-actively ‘push’ relevant information to the user. On the other hand, Proactive context-awar...

Context-awareness has become an important consideration in the development of mobile and ubiquitous systems. While efforts have been made to develop general context models and application frameworks, it remains the case that often the notion of context supported is very restrictive and/or the representation of context is based on simple key-value pairs. As a result, most existing systems lack w...