GVU Technical Report Number:
GIT-GVU-98-33
Title:
The Context Toolkit: Aiding the Development of Context-Enabled Applications
Authors:
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 for
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.
Keywords:
Context-enabled or context-aware computing, ubiquitous computing,
toolkits, widgets, applications development
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