Big Data for Context Aware Computing - Perspectives and Challenges

Big data has arrived. Myriad applications, systems generate data of humongous volumes, variety and velocity which traditional computing systems and databases are unable to manage. The proliferation of sensors in every possible device is also becoming one of the major generators of Big data. Of particular interest in this article is how context aware computing systems which derive context from data and act accordingly, deal with such huge amounts of data. Big industry players namely Google, Yahoo, and Amazon are already developing context aware applications using user data from emails, chat messages, browsing and shopping histories etc. For instance, Gmail reminds us of our flight schedule by understanding flight booking related content in our emails. Similarly, Amazon understands user preference and recommends items of interest to shop and so on. In this paper, we survey context aware computing systems from a Big data perspective. We first propose a taxonomy of existing work on the basis of sensing platforms and then discuss the latest developments in this field of Big data context aware systems focusing on how such systems deal with various Big data challenges. We conclude the paper with an insight on open research issues involving designing and developing context aware Big data generating systems.