Enabling Communities in Physical and Logical Context Areas as Added Value of Mobile and Ubiquitous Applications

This paper tries to address the question of how to provide added value to mobile people through mobile applications. Our suggestion for the next generation of value added mobile applications following the support for (i) communication and (ii) information access, is (iii) to provide mobile people with services that are very specific for the context area – an area representing a specific context – these people are currently in and (iv) to support the networking of individuals to form communities. We envision communities being built of humans, who come together in physical proximity, reside in equal or similar situations (e.g. people waiting on train- or tram stations), or do have the same interests. Spoken more general these communities will be built of humans, who come together in the same context area, where a context area can be constrained physically or logically. Therefore, this work introduces the notion of wireless context area networks (WCANs) as enabler of a ubiquitous information access.