ETH Zurich : Computer Science : Pervasive Computing : Distributed Systems : Research : Events : Dagstuhl Ubicomp

Dagstuhl Ubicomp - Abstract

Providing Infrastructure-Level Support for the Building of Context-Aware Applications

Anind Day, UC Berkeley & Intel Research

Context is poorly understood and is difficult to use in interactive applications. Using a software engineering approach, we have decomposed the process of building context-aware applications and features that are common across them that can be factored out of the application design. We designed the Context Toolkit, a software infrastructure that makes it easier for programmers to build context-aware applications. It uses simple abstractions, widgets (similar to GUI widgets that encapsulate the output of a sensor), aggregators (context repositories for people, places, and things), and interpreters (translators of context), to simplify the programming process. We describe the design of the architecture and a number of applications built with the Context Toolkit.

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