Context Awareness Issues - Essay Example

According to Chian (2009), “When designing context-aware tools, especially for mobile computing technologies it is crucial to recognize the reciprocal relationship between context and activities”. However, three features of context awareness can be jotted down here:
- a) Reduce the user interventions and present the information to the user easily.
- b) Execute the services and information automatically and save users time and effort.
- c) As per Cisco (2012), “By providing the location of rogue access points and devices, the system simplifies and enhances detection. This helps in improving the overall security of the enterprise network”.

Context awareness consists of many layers called the device layer, interpretation layer, context layer, storage layer and application layer.
a) Device layer: A device layer refers to the physical device alone.
b) Interpretation layer: This layer describes the semantics mapping between the context layer and the device layer. It includes the context interpreter and context aggregation.
c) Context layer: the context information is controlled and generated in this layer.
d) Storage Layer: The context data generated in this layer can be used to identify the application services. All historical data is stored in a database. According to Gay (2009), “The storage layer stores not only the context data of the current status but also the historical context data in the context-aware system”.
e) Application Layer: The application services can be executed and defined in this layer by querying the current status of the context and the related historical context data from the below layer.

Context-aware Components:
a) Context Acquisition: The context-aware system usually begins with the contextual data’s sensing and subsequent reunion of the contextual data.
b) Context Representation: The representation scheme that provides well-organized structuring and retrieval is required by the gathered contextual data.
c) Context Storage: this component aims to store the historical data of the system in a database. As per Shiffrin (2005), “Operations that increase the strength with which item information is stored on a given study trial also increase the storage of context information on that study trial”.
d) Context Interpretation: The interpreted context plays a key role in providing a bird’s eye view of context data and enables the adaptation process.
e) Context Adaptation: when the interpretation and reasoning of the contextual data are completed, the context adaptation starts.