Survey of Context-Aware Systems-Challenges in development of Context-Aware Applications

ABSTRACT Context-awareness has attracted increasing attention in computing and communication communities since it allows automatic adaptation of devices, systems, and applications to user's context change. The context is the information related to the situation of an entity such as the present status of people, places, things and devices in the environment. An entity is a person, device, place, or object relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, such as location, time, activities, and services .Context awareness allows for customization or creation of the application to match the preferences of the individual user, based on current context such as enterprise environment or home network .Currently context has been considered as part of a process in which users are involved, hence specifying and developing context models are needed to support context-aware applications to (a) adapt interfaces, (b) tailor the set of application-relevant data, (c) increase the precision of information retrieval (d) discover services (e) make the user interaction implicit(f) build smart environments. Context related to human factors is structured into three categories: (a) information on the user (b) the user’s social environment (c) the user’s tasks. Likewise, context related to physical environment is structured into three categories: (a) location, (b) infrastructure, and (c) physical conditions Context-aware systems are able to adapt their operations to the current context without explicit user intervention thus aim at increasing usability and effectiveness by taking environmental context into account