Condor - an application framework for mobility- based context-aware applications

It is a common understanding that context-aware applications can be difficult to develop [Dey 2000]. Context-awareness is the possibility for an application to use information about a PDA user’s environment, including information about the user himself. Usually Context-awareness includes working with sensors, but other methods are also available for acquiring contextual information (e.g. manual input). A PDAuser’s context can include physical information such as his position or nearby objects, but also information belonging to categories like system-context, application-context, social-context, historical-context and so forth. A question that arises when developing new context-aware applications is how to make such information accessible for the applications. To address this issue, I have studied six different (mobile) applications that use context-awareness for presentation of context-relevant information. With context relevant information I mean information that is associated to a contextual situation (like a Stick-e note [Brown 1995], also called tagging of context to information [Dey 2000]), and designed an improved overall application framework for such applications named Condor (Context Document Framework). The most significant innovation of this framework is how context and context relevant information is being addressed: Rather than trying to separate the functionality regarding context-awareness and context-relevant information into two different frameworks (thereby creating a twotier application), it sees both context and context relevant information as one common abstraction. The Condor framework is currently being implemented and tested at SINTEF Telecom and informatics. Background Condor was designed as a part of my master thesis (MSc degree) at the University of Oslo [Gustavsen 2002]. With guidance from my advisers at SINTEF (as a part of the AMBiLAB project), I studied six different context-aware applications, all of which has in common that they presented relevant information to the PDA-user according to his contextual situation. Two of these applications were also developed as a part of the thesis. The first, Mocado (Mobile Context Aware Demonstrator), is a tourist guide application (similar to The Lancaster Guide [Davies et al. 2001] and Cyberguide