With the recent advances in mobile platform technologies, a variety of studies on contextaware information services for the tourist information domain have been undertaken. Many studies on ontological approaches to tourist information services, moreover, have been conducted. However, most studies have focused on upper-level or domain ontologies; comparatively, few have proceeded from the perspe...

We discuss the importance of context-awareness in driving assistance systems (DAS). We motivate the advantages of incorporating the context in decision finding using several examples and show a hierarchical decomposition strategy for handling context information on a very general basis. The utility of collaboration is pointed out by discussing various situations and applications where co-operat...

Context-aware ubiquitous applications are entering everyday life. However, their implementation remains challenging as there exist very few models and tools to guide application designers and developers in mastering the complexity of context information. This becomes even more crucial as the context of a user is by nature imperfect. One way to address this issue is to associate to context infor...

This paper presents a motion attention model that aims at analyzing gesture saliency using context-related information at three different levels. At the first level, motion features are compared in the spatial context of the current video frame; at the intermediate level, salient behavior is analyzed on a short temporal context; at the third level, computation of saliency is extended to longer ...

The provision of health-care services and home assistance to the elderly and chronic patients is a challenging application scenario for Web Services composition, which support the integration of distributed, heterogeneous services in complex workflows. However, in order to support the management of the typical routine activities carried out when dealing with a patient, several contextual condit...

Research on context-aware communications recently led to the introduction of features and algorithms relying on the presence and rich, accurate context information, requiring however the introduction of cross-layer information exchanges. Cognitive radio (CR), in particular, is expected to benefit from context awareness, as the cognitive engine (CE) relies on the availability of multiple informa...

In this paper, a novel definition of Context is presented along with its usage in a Mobile application for Cultural Heritage (CH). The proposed approach is pragmatic and takes care of practical issues that need to be addressed when an implementation has to be built. Examples are shown of how the context is used for three different purposes: context-aware media retrieval, user orienteering and s...

Context information has emerged as an important resource to enable autonomy and flexibility of ubiquitous applications. The widespread use of context information necessitates an efficient lookup service in a wide-area network over multiple smart spaces. In this paper, we propose a context lookup framework based on a semantic peer-to-peer network to support the building of context-aware applicat...