Delivering adaptivity through context-awareness

Developing applications and deploying services for mobile users raises a number of issues and challenges that must be successfully addressed before the era of truly ubiquitous computing will dawn. In particular, the desire to deploy rich multimedia applications and services is severely curtailed by the limited capabilities of the current range of mobile devices as well as the limited bandwidth of current wireless cellular networks. How best to overcome these limitations remains the focus of much research. Intelligent agents have been demonstrated as a promising solution for inherently complex and dynamic domains and their use is proposed as the basis of a solution for assembling and disseminating multimedia content to a mobile audience. Attention is particularly directed to issues concerning the adaptation of content according to the end-user physical context and their personal profile or model.