Integrated Profiling of Users, Terminals, and Provisioning Environments

Context awareness is emerging as an essential feature for the next generation of Internet mobile services. Context awareness is a desirable feature for many application areas, including natural language understanding, electronic commerce, telemedicine, and e-learning, just to cite a few. It is, however, particularly relevant for mobile and pervasive computing, as mobile devices naturally enable a much wider set of contexts characterized, among other things, by a spatiotemporal dimension, a wide range of device features and networking capabilities, and very different environment situations. In this chapter, we discuss how the many parameters defining the context of a specific mobile service request can be acquired from different sources, formally represented, managed by software agents, and integrated in a consistent uniform description to be used for service adaptation