Context awareness

Context awareness refers, in information and communication technologies, to a capability to take into account the situation of entities, which may be users or devices, but are not limited to those. Location is only the most obvious element of this situation. Narrowly defined for mobile devices, context awareness does thus generalize location awareness. Whereas location may determine how certain processes around a contributing device operate, context may be applied more flexibly with mobile users, especially with users of smart phones. Context awareness originated as a term from ubiquitous computing or as so-called pervasive computing which sought to deal with linking changes in the environment with computer systems, which are otherwise static. The term has also been applied to business theory in relation to contextual application design and business process management issues. Various categorizations of context have been proposed in the past. Dey and Abowd (1999) distinguish between the context types location, identity, activity and time. Kaltz et al. (2005) identified the categories user&role, process&task, location, time and device to cover a broad variety of mobile and web scenarios. They emphasize yet for these classical modalities that any optimal categorization depends very much on the application domain and use case. Beyond more advanced modalities may apply when not only single entities are addressed, but also clusters of entities that work in a coherence of context, as e.g. teams at work or also single bearers with a multiplicity of appliances. Some classical understanding of context in business processes is derived from the definition of AAA applications with the following three categories: Authentication, which means i.e. confirmation of stated identity Authorisation, which means i.e. allowance to accrual or access to location, function, data Accounting, which means i.e. the relation to order context and to accounts for applied labour, granted license, and delivered goods, these three terms including additionally location and time as stated.