Although many context-aware systems have been developed, little attention has been paid to building a uniform framework of a Context Base and Context Base Management Systems (CBMS). Consequently, each context-aware system has to be built from the ground up. It is important that context-aware systems share context data across different domains and with all devices or services. Therefore, context...

In ubiquitous computing the provisioning of context-aware services is typically aided by a context provisioning middleware. The essential functionalities undertaken by the middleware include distributed data acquisition from sensors, context modelling, context synthesis, reasoning and context dissemination. This paper focuses on the evaluation methodologies of context-aware systems that aim to ...

Context-aware systems are applications that adapt to several situations involving user, network, data, hardware and the application itself. Researchers in context-awareness have concentrated on how to capture context data and to carry it to the application. In this paper, we study the impact of context on the core of the application. First, we give the guidelines of a context model based on a m...

Context-awareness is emerging as an essential component of many user-focused software domains. It is especially integral to pervasive or ambient computing, but can be used to control the behaviour of any system that adapts to the circumstances in which it is used. Like most new software projects, many existing context-aware systems have been constructed using objector component-oriented program...

It is a very important to develop context-aware systems that can handle, at the same time, multiple heterogeneous applications that require different contexts with different levels of abstraction. This paper proposes a framework for such systems. To handle the heterogeneity of the context required by the applications, we introduce a user activity context detection method based on the combinatio...

Context awareness enables smart service discovery and adaptation for mobile and wireless hosts. The contextual data is acquired from sensors present in the smart space, which may be absent. The inherent noisy nature of wireless environments does not guarantee the gathering of correct data. A history module is thus required in conjunction with existing context-aware systems that overcomes these ...

In this paper we present conclusions, drawn from our research on context-aware systems. Based on reviewing the literature, from which we collected definitions of context and context awareness. We provide the basis for a taxonomy of context-aware systems grouped in eight categories. They include technical aspects of these systems as well as some views of privacy and security. Usefulness of taxon...

Growing number and complexity of context-aware systems requires a modeling framework suited for comparison of approaches. As a step towards modeling context-aware systems, we describe basic elements of such a framework. We introduce internal and external context information and define context models. We describe two conceptual architectures for context-aware systems and present their implicatio...

The paper describes the idea of bringing awareness to nomadic users. Based on a discussion of different context models and approaches to model context, several scenarios for awareness in context-aware systems are presented. We describe the combination of a context aware guidance system and an awareness platform to enable awareness for nomadic users about other users that are either in a similar...