Context-aware applications: from the laboratory to the marketplace

TLDR

Current hardware developments are making mobile computing increasingly attractive, and context‑aware applications—those that adapt to a user’s location, companions, time of day, and other contextual cues—are an important class of mobile apps, though most are still crafted by research‑lab experts. This article focuses on software design for context‑aware applications. The authors aim to factor out a simple class of context‑aware applications and simplify their creation to the level of building web pages.

Abstract

Current hardware developments are making mobile computing increasingly attractive. An important class of mobile applications are context-aware applications: applications that change their behaviour according to the user's present context-their location, who they are with, what the time of day is, and so on. This article is about software design for context-aware applications. Currently most such applications have been crafted by experts in research laboratories. Our aim is to factor out a simple class of context-aware applications and make the creation of these as easy as, say, creating Web pages.