Correlation of Context Information for Mobile Services

Abstract

Location Based Services are a key driver in today's telecom market, even if the power of Location Based Services is not nearly exhausted in nowadays telecom systems. To build intuitive Location Based Services for mobile handsets one success factor is to cover a broad range of mobile handsets available on the market and to make the services context aware. Within the EUREKA project MyMobileWeb we implement a framework to obtain contextual information from handsets using various capabilities of the mobiles. Contextual Information is every information we can obtain from the handset and that can be used for any kind of service. The most obvious information is location information. Within our framework we built an architecture that can obtain location information from various sources and is not bound to any special handset capability. Furthermore the architecture can be used to obtain various other context information, such as e.g. battery level. This information in addition is then used to offer special services to the customer. For this a correlation of the context information has to be done, which is based on a correlation engine for contextual information. This paper presents a framework that can handle and correlate contextual information in a very flexible way.