Providing Contextual Information to Ubiquitous Computing Applications

Ubiquitous computing applications are increasingly leveraging contextual information from several sources to provide users with behavior appropriate to the environment in which they reside. If these sources of contextual information are used and deployed in an ad hoc manner, however, they may provide overlapping functionality, fail to provide needed functionality, and require the use of inconsistent interfaces by applications. To overcome these problems, we introduce a concise organization of services and a single service interface that provide applications with contextual information in a unified manner. We show, via example applications and services that we have implemented, how our service organization and interface can be used to allow proactive applications to adapt their behavior to match a user’s current environment. This research was sponsored in part by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and monitored by AFRL/IFGA, Rome NY 13441-4505, under contract F30602-99-1-0518. Additional support was provided by Intel. Glenn Judd is supported by a DoD National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship. Report Documentation Page Form Approved OMB No. 0704-0188 Public reporting burden for the collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Send comments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, including suggestions for reducing this burden, to Washington Headquarters Services, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports, 1215 Jefferson Davis Highway, Suite 1204, Arlington VA 22202-4302. Respondents should be aware that notwithstanding any other provision of law, no person shall be subject to a penalty for failing to comply with a collection of information if it does not display a currently valid OMB control number. 1. REPORT DATE JUL 2002 2. REPORT TYPE 3. DATES COVERED 00-00-2002 to 00-00-2002 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE Providing Contextual Information to Ubiquitous Computing Applications 5a. CONTRACT NUMBER