On the design of context-aware applications

Ignoring the dynamic context of users may lead to suboptimal applications. Hence, context-aware applications have emerged, that are aware of the end-user context situation (for example, “user is at home", “user is travelling"geen id), and provide the desirable services corresponding to the situation at hand. Developing context aware applications is not a trivial task nevertheless and the following related challenges have been identified: (i) Properly deciding what physical context to ‘sense’ and what high-level context information to pass to an application, and bridging the gap between raw context data and high level context information; (ii) Deciding which end-user context situations to consider and which to ignore; (iii) Modeling context-aware application behavior including ‘switching’ between alternative application behaviors. In this paper, we have furthered related work on context-aware application design, by explicitly discussing each of the mentioned interrelated challenges and proposing corresponding solution directions, supported by small-scale illustrative examples. It is expected that this contribution would usefully support the current efforts to improve context-aware application development.