Advances in context-aware mobile services

Context awareness refers to the system capability of both sensing and reacting to situational changes [1, 2]. It is one of the most exciting trends in computing today that holds the potential to make our daily life more productive, convenient, and enjoyable. Recently, with the rapid advances in mobile technologies, context-aware mobile services are emerging as an important technology to underpin the new breed of user-centric smart applications on the future ubiquitous mobile Web [3, 4]. Although mobile devices naturally have the capability to capture both the physical context, such as location, and the social context, such as presence and relationships, of users, there are many hurdles to cross in order to realize the full potential of contextaware mobile services. For example, how to extract/derive pertinent context information from the World Wide Web and the mobile networks and evaluate its quality? How to effectively manage the physical and social context information, including its security and privacy? Which is largely distributed over the Web? How to facilitate the development and deployment of mobile context-aware services? just name a few. Providing solutions to these issues may release the full potential of context-aware mobile services and bring genuine user expectation and satisfaction.