Context awareness

Context awareness is a property of mobile devices that is defined complementarily to location awareness. Whereas location may determine how certain processes around a contributing device operate, context may be applied more flexibly with mobile users, especially with users of smart phones. Context awareness originated as a term from ubiquitous computing or as so-called pervasive computing which sought to deal with linking changes in the environment with computer systems, which are otherwise static. The term has also been applied to business theory in relation to contextual application design and business process management issues.

Various categorizations of context have been proposed in the past. Dey and Abowd (1999) distinguish between the context types location, identity, activity and time. Kaltz et al. (2005) identified the categories user&role, process&task, location, time and device to cover a broad variety of mobile and web scenarios. They emphasize yet for these classical modalities that any optimal categorization depends very much on the application domain and use case. Beyond more advanced modalities may apply when not only single entities are addressed, but also clusters of entities that work in a coherence of context, as e.g. teams at work or also single bearers with a multiplicity of appliances.

Some classical understanding of context in business processes is derived from the definition of AAA applications with the following three categories:

these three terms including additionally location and time as stated.

In computer science context awareness 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. The term context awareness in ubiquitous computing was introduced by Schilit (1994). Context-aware devices may also try to make assumptions about the user's current situation. Dey (2001) define context as "any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity."

While the computer science community initially perceived the context as a matter of user location, as Dey discuss, in the last few years this notion has been considered not simply as a state, but part of a process in which users are involved; thus, sophisticated and general context models have been proposed (see survey), to support context-aware applications which use them to (a) adapt interfaces, (b) tailor the set of application-relevant data, (c) increase the precision of information retrieval, (d) discover services, (e) make the user interaction implicit, or (f) build smart environments. For example: a context-aware mobile phone may know that it is currently in the meeting room, and that the user has sat down. The phone may conclude that the user is currently in a meeting and reject any unimportant calls.

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