Context Awareness in Pervasive Information Management

Context has been defined as the knowledge that can be used to characterize the situation of any entity that is relevant for the (pervasive) system under consideration: given a target application scenario, a context-aware system supports users and devices by providing selective access to the set of data and operations (e.g., interesting services and information, environmental data, close-by people, points of interest etc.) which is relevant in each specific context. More than that, the relative importance of a piece of information to the same user in different contexts or, reciprocally, to different users in the same context may vary enormously; thus the system can personalize information even further by ranking the provided data on the basis of (contextual) user preferences. This chapter presents an introduction to context-aware information management, first providing a literature review and then introducing the main steps needed to design a context-aware system. Context-related problems particularly relevant within pervasive data management are then discussed. We briefly analyze techniques to efficiently associate contexts with information chunks, the evolution issues which arise when the context representation changes over time, the discovery and application of contextual user preferences, and, last but certainly not least, how context awareness can be enforced in the middleware of a pervasive system.