Containment: from Context Awareness to Contextual Effects Awareness

Context plays a key role, as recongnized by a wide body of research, in application and entity adaptation in the ubiquitous computing world characterized by extensive platform heterogenity and environment dynamicity and unpredictability. Implicit in the notion of context, as used by context-aware applications, is the actual effects, including constraints, context has on target entities. We believe that making a step further from explicit reasoning about context to explicit reasoning about its implicit effects will facilitate more effective and flexible adaptation. In this work we present an approach to modeling the world based on natural notions of container and containment and show how it enables explicit reasoning about and acting upon context-implied effects on target entities, data objects in particular. We also outline a practical use of the model through its application in a system for autonomic context-aware infromation security and privacy