Me-Centric Domain Server: Changing the Way Services See You

We present an architectural support for building context-aware applications. With the increasing acceptance of dynamic mobile and ubiquitous computing environments, applications are no longer bound to information explicitly provided by users. Instead, these environments invite a new kind of applications that can leverage from implicit information ranging from a simple time-of-a-day information to an elaborate description of user’s current activity - commonly referred to as the context. Although the context-aware computing paradigm has been introduced over a decade ago, so far there exist only a limited number of context-aware solutions available to everyday users. We believe that this is due to the tight coupling of contextual operations where each application is required to sense, collect, interpret and apply all information independently from others. To overcome this issue we propose a decoupled approach where the information sensing, aggregation, and interpretation is provided by external services, and applications are only concerned with applying the contextual information according to their needs. Moreover, we focus on the design and specification of a generic service capable of both aggregating and interpreting contextual information as part of the Me-Centric computing project, and demonstrate its capability in an office-based scenario.