Supporting Context-Awareness: A Taxonomic Review

Abstract

Context-aware applications realise the vision of ubiquitous computing by utilising information gathered from their environment to automatically adapt behaviour. To support the development of such applications, researchers have developed infrastructures, architectures, middlewares, and toolkits. This paper presents a taxonomy based on a review of these support infrastructures for context-aware computing. The taxonomy is organised as a set of categories, each of which is responsible for classifying context-related functionality at the software component level. It provides the nomenclature of terminology used to describe the features that characterise infrastructures for context-aware computing. The taxonomy supports the design of context-aware systems and provides a convenient way to compare and contrast middleware support for context-awareness.