Towards ubiquitous awareness: the PRAVTA prototype

Despite huge progress in information and communication technology it is often difficult to spontaneously contact persons who are at other locations. This is often due to the fact that important information about the persons at the other sites is missing. We therefore argue that users need awareness-they need to know if the potential communication or cooperation partners are present in the system, if they are available, how busy they are, and so forth. Furthermore, users need this information independently of their current location and adapted to their current context. In this paper we introduce the concept of ubiquitous awareness-a concept that provides users with context-specific information about the presence, availability, and tasks of other persons anytime and anywhere and at the same time allows the system to capture information about users. We present the PRAVTA prototype that exemplifies an implementation of this concept.