Enabling location-based applications

Abstract

We identify a number of factors that may hinder the commercial success of location-based applications: the concern of privacy, the need to consider context beyond location, the presence of voluminous resources, and the constrained interfaces available on mobile devices. We describe an end-to-end system architecture with integrated support to address these issues. In particular, the architeeture includes a Secure Context Service that provides broad context information to applications and allows people to flexibly control the release of their private information, an Intelligent Service Discovery Service that allows for personalized selection of physical and virtual services, and a multi-modal interaction mechanism that enables users to exploit multiple synchronized access channels to interact with an application and to switch among channels at any time. Our goals are to improve user experience, to reduce user distraction and to facilitate awareness of the physical world.

The Java Context Awareness Framework (JCAF) – A Service Infrastructure and Programming Framework for Context-Aware Applications

“…-Security and Privacy -Context data, used e.g. in a medical setting, should be protected, subject to access control, and not revealed to unauthorized clients [4,15]. Furthermore, establishing the credibility and origin of context information is key for some type of context-aware applications.…”

“…The modeling mechanisms in the framework are semantic-free -in this example with the pill container having a patient in its context might just as well be interpreted differently. For example, having the patient in the container's context might mean that the patient is located close to it 4 . …”

“…Creating support for context-awareness by having a server or infrastructure component is common in many context-awareness systems, like Schilit's mobile application customization system [18], the Contextual Information Service (CIS) [17], the Trivial Context System (TCoS) [11], and the Secure Context Service (SCS) [4,15]. All of these act as the middleware that acquires raw contextual information from sensors and provides interpreted context to applications via a standard API.…”

“…Despite the importance of security and privacy in ubiquitous computing [14] little work have been done here, with the Secure Context Service (SCS) [4,15] as a notable exception. However, SCS is based on a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) mechanism and is a closed system where the identity of all clients must be known to the system a priori.…”

An Architecture for Ubiquitous Applications

“…A number of frameworks have been proposed to facilitate contextawareness in ubiquitous environments. Some of them are centralized context servers, for instance Schilit's mobile application customization system [16], the Contextual Information Service (CIS) [13], the Trivial Context System (TCoS) [7] and the Secure Context Service (SCS) [1], [10]. These systems operate as middleware collecting unprocessed data from sensors, treating it and providing interpreted, high level context information to applications.…”