The Rationale for Infrastructure Support for Adaptive and Context-aware Applications: A Position Paper

Research has demonstrated that mobile and wireless applications benefit from a knowledge of their operating environment. Examples of context-aware or adaptive applications have been constructed and evaluated with the results being widely disseminated within the research community. However, the field is still sufficiently new that there are currently no standards for describing, disseminating or managing the necessary contextual information. Moreover, there are no standards (or even accepted best practices) for coordinating adaptation across multiple applications and systems. In this position paper we argue that the lack of standards in this area will inhibit the widespread deployment of many of the compelling context-aware mobile applications currently being designed.