Enabling the use of context in interactive applications

Abstract

Context is an important, yet poorly understood and poorly utilized source of information in interactive computing. It will be of particular importance in the new millennium as users move away from their desktops and into settings where their contexts are changing rapidly. Context is difficult to use because, unlike other forms of user input, there is no common, reusable way to handle it. As a result, context- aware applications have been built in an ad hoc manner, making it difficult to build new applications or evolve existing ones. In this research, we are examining the requirements of context-aware applications, building a toolkit, which enables the use of context and fulfills these requirements, and testing the usability of this toolkit for application designers. Copyright © 2012 ACM, Inc.