Title
Distributed context-aware systems
Abstract
Currently, context-aware applications are defined as applications that react appropriately to information sensed in the environment, as opposed to applications that elaborate only information explicitly provided by users. Context is (implicitly or explicitly) thought of as a collection of features of the (physical or virtual) environment, which can affect the behavior of an application. Though this notion of context is relatively unproblematic in systems with central control, it raises a number of challenging issues when applied to distributed systems-namely, systems in which control is distributed over a group of heterogeneous, autonomous, interacting entities (typically, agents). Indeed, in distributed applications, we cannot assume that autonomous entities share a context, even though each of them uses contextual information for its operations. In this essay, we discuss in detail this claim and present a notion of context that seems to be adequate for distributed systems. For the sake of illustration, we outline how this notion of context can be used to design distributed context-aware systems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2001
10.1207/S15327051HCI16234_06
Human computer interaction
Keywords
Field
DocType
interacting entity,context-aware application,context-aware system,contextual information,central control,autonomous entity,virtual environment
Contextual information,Computer science,Knowledge management,Context model,Human–computer interaction
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
16
2
0737-0024
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
15
1.19
7
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Massimo Benerecetti128734.60
Paolo Bouquet21024112.22
Matteo Bonifacio312115.69