This term refers to the idea that computers can both sense, and react based on their environment. Devices may have information about the circumstances under which they are able to operate and based on rules, or an intelligent stimulus, react accordingly. One goal of context-aware computing is to acquire and utilize information about the context of a device to provide services that are appropriate to the particular people, place, time, events, and so forth. Context-awareness is fine in theory. The research issue is figuring out how to get it to work in practice. The problems for human-computer interaction, in particular, are significant ones. Context-aware computing completely redefines the basic notions of interface and interaction. Actually, context-awareness is used to design innovative user interfaces, and is often used as a part of ubiquitous and wearable computing. It is also beginning to be felt in the internet with the advent of hybrid search engines
Published in Chapter:
Context Modelling Approaches for Mobile Systems
Danilo Avola (Istituto di Ricerca sulla Popolazione e le Politiche Sociali, Italy)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 15
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-046-2.ch026
Abstract
The actual mobile technology and the increasing need to obtain rich multimedia content about each and every aspect of the human life are changing the approach of the users to the World Wide Web. Indeed, the pervasive use of mobile devices and the heterogeneity of the provided services and information make the accessibility and usability of the Web resources a hard assignment. In particular two main tasks have been identified as focal issues, the first one regards the choose of a suitable model to express the complex activities of the Web (context modeling approaches), and the second one regards the translation of the different schemas, representing these Web activities, in a more suitable, manageable and standardizing schema. In this chapter we will present the problems related to the modeling of context data, and we will describe the actual and future approaches of Context Modeling according to the mobile devices world.