State of the Art: Context Management

The main objective of ubiquitous computing is to decrease the effort required to exploit computing to aid human activities. “Ubiquitous computing has as its goal the enhancing computer use by making many computers available throughout the physical environment, but making them effectively invisible to the user” (Weiser 1993). Furthermore if the user wishes to extract the maximum benefit from the computing environment, the associated systems and services must cooperate and integrate their information and the general information about the situation in which the user wishes the carry out the task. This information about the user’s situation is called context. Humans have always used situational information, or context, to make inter-personal interactions richer. If computers use context while interacting with humans, they can offer more useful services and information to humans than is possible without the application of context. The main challenge with computers using context while interacting with humans, is that there is no standard, reusable model that can be used to handle context.