Share Whatever You Like

To leverage proactive context-aware services for mobile handsets, an architecture for the management, aggregation and distribution of information is required. This work presents a framework that has been developed to realize an extensible infrastructure in which personal information can be shared with others while on the go. Access control mechanisms restrict the distribution of data based on social relationships and the validity of context conditions. The future of mobile services is meant to be context-aware. Context-aware services have long been seen as the natural advancement of location-based services, which were introduced more than five years ago. At last, today's mobile handsets are offering various features that place this progress within reach, being equipped with various sensors, sufficiently powerful computing resources and the possibility to manage all kinds of personal information. And yet, their most important asset may be their omnipresence. This circumstance quickens the interest in intelligent services, designed to adapt to the user's current situation. Here, a framework for context aggregation is needed to manage the distribution and combination of information from various sources. Our context management framework (CMF) builds on initial work (1) accomplished within the IST-project MobiLife 1 (2). Today, the CMF represents an open network of distributed and highly interconnected components to gather, aggregate and further exchange context information proactively. It enables the transformation of quantitative context information into qualitative statements about a user's given situation. Share whatever you like reflects some of the CMF's main requirements on context distribution and access control. Sharing personal memories and experiences clearly involves a number of privacy issues that need to be carefully considered from the start. The CMF architecture tackles these constraints without compromising its open and extensible nature. IYOUIT 2