Presented at CHI 1999.
The Context Toolkit: Aiding the Development of Context-Enabled Applications Daniel Salber, Anind K. Dey & Gregory D. Abowd
Abstract
Context-enabled applications are just emerging and promise richer interaction by taking environmental
context into account. However, they are difficult to build due to their distributed nature and the use of
unconventional sensors. The concepts of toolkits and widget libraries in graphical user interfaces has been
tremendously successful, allowing programmers to leverage off existing building blocks to build interactive
systems more easily. We introduce the concept of context widgets that mediate between the environment
and the application in the same way graphical widgets mediate between the user and the application. We
illustrate the concept of context widgets with the beginnings of a widget library we have developed for
sensing presence, identity and activity of people and things. We assess the success of our approach with
two example context-enabled applications we have built and an existing application to which we have
added context-sensing capabilities.