The What, Who, Where, When, Why and How of Context-Awareness

Abstract

The understanding of context and context-awareness is very important for the areas of handheld and ubiquitous computing. Unfortunately, at present, there has not been a satisfactory definition of these two concepts that would lead to a more effective communication in humancomputer interaction. As a result, on the one hand, application designers are not able to choose what context to use in their applications and on the other, they cannot determine the type of context-awareness behaviours their applications should exhibit. In this work, we aim to provide answers to some fundamental questions that could enlighten us on the definition of context and its functionality.