Context-Aware Systems: Models and Functionality

Context aware systems reduce the need for user intervention and provide smarter services by considering a user’s situation. Context models decide how the contextual information is modeled and what type of context should be considered; they are essential in providing the “right” services to the users. Existing surveys of context-aware systems focus heavily on the data structures for modeling contextual information and the architecture of context-aware systems. In this chapter, the authors focus on the contextual information being modeled and the functionality provided by context-aware systems. They present a classification framework for both context models and the functionality of context-aware systems. The authors then compare existing context-aware systems against the classification framework. Moreover, they show how a higher level context model can be derived from the fundamental elements in the classification framework of context models.