Interactive Paper as a Mobile Client for a Multi-channel Web Information System

We describe how interactive paper can be used together with a multi-channel web information system to build a platform for experimenting with multi-modal context-aware mobile information services. As an application, we present a tourist guide for visitors to an international festival that was developed to investigate alternative modes of information delivery and interaction in mobile environments. The guide is based around a set of interactive paper documents—an event brochure, map and bookmark. The brochure and map are augmented with digital services by using a digital pen to activate links and a text-to-speech engine for information delivery. The digital pen is also used for data capture of event ratings and reviews. The bookmark provides access to advanced searches and ticket reservations. We describe the architecture and operation of the system, highlighting the challenges of extending a web information system to support both the generation of the paper documents and the interaction from these documents, alongside more traditional access channels. Finally, we discuss the range of context-aware interactions that is supported by our platfor

User-Centered Context-Aware Mobile Applications―The Next Generation of Personal Mobile Computing

Context-aware mobile applications are systems that can sense clues about the situational environment and enable appropriate mechanisms of interaction between end users and systems, making mobile devices more intelligent, adaptive, and personalized. In order to better understand such systems and the potentials and barriers of their development and practical use, this paper provides a state-of-the-art overview of this emerging field. Unlike previous literature reviews that mainly focus on technological aspects of such systems, we examine this field mainly from application and research methodology perspectives. We will present major types of current context-aware mobile applications, and discuss research methodologies used in existing studies and their limitations, and highlight potential future research

A General Methodology for Context-Aware Data Access

In this paper, we present an extensible approach to the adap-tation of Web information delivery according to different and possibly heterogeneous contexts. The approach is based on a general notion of profile that can be used to represent a variety of contexts at different level of details. Each profile terms, how information has to be delivered by taking into account the requirements of adaptation for the profile. We present a general and extensible methodology for content adaptation based on the generation and management of con-figurations. The genericity of the approach guarantees that different types of contexts and orthogonal requirements of adaptation, possibly not fixed in advance, can be taken into account in the adaptation process. We also describe archi-tecture and functionality of a prototype implementing the proposed methodology. We finally provide a number of ex-perimental results of the system to support the effectiveness and efficiency of the approach