into living room in Bob’s home and only location
device is put into his room.
In Figure 6-(a), Bob stands in front of door.
When Bob enters into living room by clicking
“ENTER” button of Front Door in Figure 6-(a), the
location sensor detects his presence and turns the
light on. But the TV does not go on by the Rule
designated by the TV On/Off Adaptation
Algorithm(Figure 6-(b)). If Bob enters into his room
by clicking “ENTER” button of Room in Figure 6-
(b), the location sensor detects his presence(Figure
6-(c)). In Figure 6-(b), If Bob sits on the sofa by
clicking “Sit Down” button of sofa in living room,
by the rule, the TV goes on(Figure 6-(d)).
4.3 Analysis
We have compared and reviewed CAST realized by
a prototype and preceding studies, focusing on the
following (Gerti Kappel and Birgit Proll, 2003). As
a result, we could find a big merit of guaranteed
security in the aspects of context acquirement(The
first security challenge) and sharing(The second
security challenge) in Table 1.
The comparison detail would be the following
(Gerti Kappel and Birgit Proll, 2003):
• Automation. Concerning the acquisition of
context, first it has to be defined who is in charge for
gathering appropriate context information, be it
either a human(manual acquisition) or the
system(automatic acquisition) or a combination
thereof(semi-automatic acquisition).
• Dynamicity. Another important aspect is when
context acquisition takes place. Considering the
frequency of context changes, context can be either
static, i.e., determined once at application start
up(e.g., the device used to select the appropriate
interaction style), without considering any further
changes or dynamic, i.e., determined on every
change during runtime(e.g., the bandwidth to adapt
the resolution of an image on the fly).
• Abstraction. According to the level of
abstraction where context properties are represented
it should be distinguished between physical context
and logical context. Whereas physical context is at a
very low level of abstraction which can be directly
sensed from the environment, logical context would
enable to enrich its semantics thus making it meani
ngful for customisation purposes.
• Authentication. It means which context
information acquired from certain types(manual,
semi-automatic, automatic) is valid, that is, if the
context is attained from certified source.(The first
Security challenge)
• Authorization. It means whether it provides
the acquired context information to only the
application with due authority.(The second Security
challenge)
5 CONCLUSION & FUTURE
WORK
The study suggested CAST for the purpose of
acquiring, expressing and safely using context
information in the previous sections and probed its
feasibility by a Demo of a realistic prototype. In
particular, CAST acquires valid context and supports
the function of sharing it with only authorized
applications. This is significant because it provides
virtual experimental environment to the S/W-major
context researchers who find it difficult to fabricate
physical sensors.
Future studies are called for the following area.
First, the automation of CAST components is
necessary. For the present prototypes, only Device
interface, agent and CAST
middleware
(Event Manager,
Context Manager) have been realized. In the future,
through the automation of all the components, a
more useful CAST will be developed and be open to
the context researchers. Second, the extension of
domain is necessary. Later studies will include other
such various domains as schools and hospitals
besides home in their research. Finally, it is expected
to have a study on context modeling that is more
typical and acceptable as the standard performed at
the same time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This study was financially supported by Chonnam
National University.
REFERENCES
G. D. Abowd, 1999, “Software Engineering Issues for
Ubiquitous computing”, Int. Conf. on Software
Engineering, Los Angeles,
A. K. Dey, G. D. Abowd, 2000, “The Context Toolkit:
Aiding the Development of Context-Aware
Applications”, Workshop on Software Engineering for
Wearable and Pervasive Computing, Limerick, Ireland
A. K. Dey, G. Kortuem, D. R. Morse, A. Schmidt, 2001,
“Situated Interaction and Context-Aware Computing”,
editorial, Personal Ubi Comp, Vol. 5 No. 1, pp. 1-3
Dey, A.K., Salber, D. Abowd, G.D., 2001, “A Conceptual
Framework and a Toolkit for Supporting the Rapid
Prototyping of Context-Aware Applications”, anchor
article of a special issue on Context-Aware Computing
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Computing
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