Our Goals

The main objective of the project is to provide design guidelines for context-aware services and underlying components that perform context acquisition, refinement and dissemination. Fast service creation is supported by a flexible framework that provides the necessary functionality. Standardized interfaces allow the exchange of context-information in a multi-provider environment.

Today’s service platforms do not offer this kind of functionality. At best they offer proprietary solutions which, however, do not satisfy the requirements of UMTS networks as far as roaming, service flexibility and multi provider environments are concerned. Additionally, those platforms are designed to only support a specific scenario and are not extensible.

Context information describes the situation of an entity. Typical representatives are location, time, identity of the user, temperature and weather, device and network characteristics as well as user preferences, mood and current occupation.

The introduction of context-aware services in UMTS networks induces several research questions: How can context information be classified? Are there classes of context-aware services? Which roles need to be involved in the context provisioning process? Which strategies are better suited than others for the acquisition, storing, and dissemination of context information? Which infrastructure services are necessary for transparently providing context information?

The project addresses these questions by providing a generic reference model for context-aware services in UMTS, an adequate business model, and a set of necessary infrastructure services. Prototypes will proof the developed concepts.

The intensive work in the area of context-awareness has shown the relevance of that topic for the research community. KODI is now looking forward to take the next step and pave the way for the introduction of context-awareness into commercial systems such as UMTS networks.