Mobile Intelligence

13.2 BACKGROUND

With more than 2 billions terminals in commercial operation worldwide, wireless and mobile technologies have facilitated in the first wave of pervasive communication systems and applications. This trend shows several aspects consistent in the evolution of computing including the increasing miniaturization of the computing units and an increasing emphasis of the role of communication between them. Significant research work has been done over recent years on these systems at several levels, from the lowest physical level to the highest information-processing level. However, the latter is less developed than the research at the lower levels. For instance, we think that the most relevant issue for the future perspective of true ubiquitous computing, context awareness and context-dependency has not received justified attention in the research community.

The term context has been extensively studied since the early 1990s; it was mainly associated with the concept of location, but it is much richer than this; some works have categorized context into different aspects, such as computational, user, physical, spatial, and temporal context [1–6]. However, a precise definition of context is still missing. In this chapter, we interpret context as a setting in which an event occurs, and this definition, we believe, is suitable for the system software research.

As the previous work [7], we have described a formal approach to context-aware mobile computing: we offer the context-aware ...