Title: A survey on context-aware systems

Authors: Matthias Baldauf, Schahram Dustdar, Florian Rosenberg

Addresses: V-Research, Industrial Research and Development, Stadtstrasse 33, 6850 Dornbirn, Austria. ' Distributed Systems Group, Information Systems Institute, Vienna University of Technology, Argentinierstrasse 8/184-1, 1040 Vienna, Austria. ' Distributed Systems Group, Information Systems Institute, Vienna University of Technology, Argentinierstrasse 8/184-1, 1040 Vienna, Austria

Abstract: Context-aware systems offer entirely new opportunities for application developers and for end users by gathering context data and adapting systems behaviour accordingly. Especially in combination with mobile devices, these mechanisms are of high value and are used to increase usability tremendously. In this paper, we present common architecture principles of context-aware systems and derive a layered conceptual design framework to explain the different elements common to most context-aware architectures. Based on these design principles, we introduce various existing context-aware systems focusing on context-aware middleware and frameworks, which ease the development of context-aware applications. We discuss various approaches and analyse important aspects in context-aware computing on the basis of the presented systems.

Keywords: context awareness; context frameworks; context middleware; sensors; context models; context ontology; context-aware services; conceptual design; context-aware architectures; context-aware computing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2007.014070

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2007 Vol.2 No.4, pp.263 - 277

Published online: 17 Jun 2007 *

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