Context-Aware Computing: A Guide for the Pervasive Computing Community

There is a high interest on context-aware computing expressed by the pervasive computing community, which considers context as a key to design more adaptive applications. Due to this interest, a huge amount of contributions have been made in the field as we can notice from the increasing amount of publications on context and context-aware computing. However, the user interested in integrating context in its specific application will rapidly find himself in a jungle of various tools and techniques. This paper aims at structuring this information by providing a survey on the main context-aware categorization, acquisition and modeling techniques. "Main" refers to the most promising techniques in terms of their genericity in a way that they can be used in various application domains. This work tends to provide a guide for the pervasive computing community in order to select the best technique to use in a specific application or -more interesting- to justify the development of a new one.