An Infrastructure Approach to Context-Aware Computing

The Context Toolkit (Dey, Salber, and Abowd 2001 [this special issue]) is only one of many possible architectures for supporting context-aware applications. In this essay, we look at the trade-offs involved with a service infrastructure approach to context-aware computing. We describe the advantages that a service infrastructure for contextawareness has over other approaches, outline some of the core technical challenges that must be addressed before such an infrastructure can be built, and point out promising research directions for overcoming these challenges.