Context Shadow A Person-Centric Infrastructure for Context Aware Computing.pdf

Context Shadow: A Person-Centric Infrastructure for Context Aware Computing Martin Jonsson The FUSE Research Group, KTH Center for Wireless Systems, KTH DSV, Electrum 230, SE-164 40 Kista, Sweden martinj@dsv.su.se Abstract. In ubiquitous computing environments, hardware and software ser- vices will create huge and ubiquitous service spaces. These service spaces will need to be organized in meaningful ways so that the services can be easily ac- cessed and utilized by other services and humans. Context Shadow is a system that makes it possible for services to ask questions about a person’s current context, and specifically about what services that are relevant to that context. In the system, sensors and services are organized in meaningful collections, creat- ing a searchable topology of context information. 1 Introduction Providing information about the users context to applications is potentially very useful in several ways. The behavior of an application can be adapted to make the interaction more efficient or to increase the ease of use. You can also imagine entirely new types of applications that are designed specifically to make use of some certain context information. Under the notion of context aware computing there have been several attempts both to define what context really is, and how to design applications that use it [1-2]. In this paper context aware computing will be viewed from a ubiquitous- or disap- pearing computing perspective [3]. The assumption we make is that our everyday environments will become increasingly more readable and controllable. This is due to the ability to embed computers into everyday objects, and to connect them to the Internet. We also see an increasing use of personal mobile computing artifacts. These new stationary and mobile artifacts will provide different kinds of services either to a user directly or it will be accessible to other software services over the Internet. This will result in a pote