A context awareness framework for cross-platform distributed applications

With the introduction of interconnected cross-platform middleware, a new area of opportunities for ubiquitous/pervasive computing has emerged. Context aware applications can be enhanced to practically and realistically incorporate multiple facets of human-machine interactions in everyday life that are not limited to a device-centered model for deducing context. In this paper, we propose that they can rather extend this model to a human-centered, device and platform independent model, based on a personal distributed application and data cloud ecosystem. For this to be achieved, webinos, a set of web runtime extensions that enable web applications and services to be used and shared consistently and securely over a broad spectrum of converged and connected devices, is used to provide this ecosystem. The webinos Context Awareness Framework described here is accessible to each webinos-enabled application. After strict policy enforcement, it can collect contextual information, either via an automatic mechanism that intercepts native calls made by webinos applications through the various webinos APIs, via an automatic polling mechanism to these APIs, or via custom, application-specific context schema extensions. It can then distribute the contextual information from its own personal cloud storage mechanism, in the form of simple, manageable and intuitive Context Objects, to and from all webinos-enabled devices owned by the same user, or even other, authorized users.