Framework for Building Mobile Context-Aware Applications

Abstract

Computers are no match to humans in deducing situational information from their environment and in using it in their interactions. The advent of Context-aware applications seems to offer a way out to the computer that is not context-sensitive. Context-aware applications sense context information and modify their behavior accordingly without explicit user intervention, thereby providing human-centric services. Currently available context-aware application development environments are not user friendly, not to speak of the difficulty in sensing context. Many frameworks for context-aware applications have been devised in this regard. Most frameworks help develop context-aware applications, but none of them provides the generic kernel that can be adapted to different kinds of context-aware application in the mobile and Internet computing environments. This paper proposes a general, conceptual framework. It attempts to incorporate all the features of earlier framework architectures in a non-redundant manner. Also, the proposal is being tried on the OASIS(Office Application Service for Intelligent Systems being developed by the authors) system that is based on Jini and Internet technologies. The conceptual framework appears to be an efficient and adequate mechanism for mobile contextaware applications.