Supporting different patterns of interaction through context-aware data management

Ubiquitous and mobile computing often introduce novel modes of interaction with different interaction patterns than those typical of traditional desktop applications. Therefore, there is a need to extend general models and systems for context-awareness to include adaptation of interaction styles to context. We present an object-oriented data management system that supports context-awareness through a notion of multi-variant objects and describe how it was used to implement context-aware interaction patterns. Our approach was motivated by our experiences of developing a mobile application that offered an interface based on a set of interactive paper documents alongside a regular web interface and we use this example to explain the issues and our solution in detail