BibTeX
@TECHREPORT{Nelson98context-awareand,
author = {Giles John Nelson},
title = {Context-Aware and Location Systems},
institution = {},
year = {1998}
}
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Abstract
ii To my mother and father iii iv Computing systems are becoming increasingly mobile, with users interacting with many networked devices, both xed and portable, over the course of a day. This has lead to the emergence of a new paradigm of computing, the context-aware system. A user's context can be described as their relationship to computing devices, colleagues and the surrounding physical environment. Applications using such a system are made aware of changes in the physical and computing environment, and adjust themselves accordingly. For example, with knowledge of the locations of people and equipment, a suitable nearby display can be determined to deliver a message to a mobile user. Context-aware systems are currently ad-hoc in nature, typically developed around a particular technology and oriented towards supporting a particular type of application. Current location systems are similarly ad-hoc with no notion of abstraction above a particular locating technology. Furthermore, little analysis has been conducted into the application requirements of a location system. This general lack of systems design makes current approaches di cult to extend and generalise. This thesis proposes a systems architecture for the support of context-aware applications. It is asserted that such anarchitecture requires three main areas of capability. Firstly, a context-aware system needs to monitor the physical environment and make this information available in a uniform way. Secondly, location information requires higher-level management together with a representation of static parts of the physical domain. Further, support is required to enable complex, asynchronous monitoring of spatial areas. Thirdly, application support is required to access distributed sensor and location services, so facilitating the simple speci cation of context-aware scenarios. v vi
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