Context-Aware Computing

4Acquiring Context

Abstract: Timely and high-quality context is critical to the success of context-aware applications. Almost all context-aware systems have two indispensable components, namely, context provider and context consumer. The former is responsible for supplying diverse context information about users and environments, while the later makes use of context information in building context-aware applications. The diversity and quantity of context information from heterogeneous context suppliers to different consumers justify the need for a generic re-usable mechanism to manage context data flow from low-level providers to high-level consumers. This chapter presents a declarative specification language for quality-aware context acquisition. ...