Context Awareness in Mobile Systems

  • Mohamed Sarwat
  • Jie Bao
  • Chi-Yin Chow
  • Justin Levandoski
  • Amr Magdy
  • Mohamed F. Mokbel
Chapter
Part of the Data-Centric Systems and Applications book series (DCSA)

Abstract

Context represents any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity is a person, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and application themselves. The ubiquity of mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, GPS devices) has in part motivated the use of contextual information in modern mobile applications. From one perspective, context in mobile systems can fall into three categories: (a) user context that includes the personal attributes of the user, e.g., spatial location and budget; (b) point-of-interest (POI) context, e.g., restaurant location, operating time, and rating; and (c) environmental context, e.g., weather and road conditions. Incorporating such context in applications provided to mobile users may significantly enhance the quality of service in terms of finding more related answers. This chapter first gives a brief overview of context and context awareness in mobile systems. It then discusses different ways of expressing the spatial location context within mobile services. The chapter later describes three main application examples that can take advantage of various mobile contexts, namely, social news feed, microblogging (e.g., Twitter) and recommendation services. The chapter finally presents a generic method that incorporates context and user preference awareness in database systems—which may serve as a backbone for context-aware mobile applications.

Keywords

Recommender System Query Processing Mobile System Relevance Score User Context 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • Mohamed Sarwat
    • 1
  • Jie Bao
    • 2
  • Chi-Yin Chow
    • 3
  • Justin Levandoski
    • 4
  • Amr Magdy
    • 5
  • Mohamed F. Mokbel
    • 5
  1. 1.Arizona State UniversityTempeUSA
  2. 2.Microsoft Research AsiaBeijingChina
  3. 3.City University of Hong KongHong KongChina
  4. 4.Microsoft ResearchRedmondUSA
  5. 5.University of MinnesotaMinneapolisUSA

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