Supporting generic context-aware applications for mobile devices

Abstract

Most of the advances in the field of context-aware middleware center on the research of the components necessary to create one. Although this is vital and gives important insights, it does not immediately enable us to build context-aware applications more easily. Too few projects reach the state of a usable software product. In this paper we describe an approach to separate the building of context-aware applications from the middleware. The centerpiece is an interface to independently define a context-aware application and its state. Additionally we provide a coarse protocol definition for the communication between the instances of a context-aware middleware by the example of a client/server system for mobile devices.