Today’s users suffer from ignorance about available mobile services, i.e., services accessible with mobile devices. Often, just because a mobile user is unaware of some available and potentially interesting service in his current context, he does not end up using it. Users would thereby benefit from a compact summary of available services in various contexts. A proactive environment could be aware of the users’ profiles and the current—possibly also future—contexts. Should the environment also have access to the available services, it could offer these summaries for the users. Another desirable functionality for such environment would be to allow the users themselves to share these summaries with each other. The current and future context can also determine how a service or composition of services should be accessed and presented to the user.
The main objective of the DYNAMOS project is to design and evaluate a system for providing context-aware services for mobile users, with the focus on proactively notifying the users about potentially interesting services. In addition, the project investigates issues related with storing and managing service descriptions and how users may annotate and share these descriptions with each other. Motivation for this hybrid approach, depicted by Figure 1, stems from the following phenomenon: Often the service provider has insufficient knowedge about the users’ contexts and profiles. For example, people are often poor in providing the system with their profile data. This can be due to reluctance based on privacy issues or just plain laziness. Therefore, there exists a huge amount of implicit profile data not accessible by the system. However, other people such as friends, colleagues, or family members typically have knowledge about some of this implicit profile data. Thereby, we will provide the users with a possibility of sharing information about services with each other.
Figure 2 depicts the hybid service provision model via an example taking place in recreational boating setting. In the example the three content recognized by DYNAMOS, namely service descriptions, service annotations, and user notes, are present. Service descriptions are created by service providers, while service annotations and user notes are created by users of the system. User notes can refer to any content. In the lower part of the figure a user has come across a user note, which warns him about a potentially dangerous route in certain weather conditions. Service annotations, instead, always refer to service descriptions. Depending on the individual profile rules, when coming across a service, the user is provided either with the original service description with the annotation referring to the service description in question. The upper part of the figure depicts working with service descriptions and annotations.
O. Riva and S. Toivonen. The DYNAMOS Approach to Support Context-aware Service Provisioning in Mobile Environments. To appear in The Journal of Systems and Software, 2007. [PDF]
O. Riva. Contory: A Middleware for the Provisioning of Context Information on Smart Phones. In Proceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 7th International Middleware Conference (Middleware'06), Melbourne, Australia, November - December 2006. [PDF]
S. Toivonen and O. Riva. The Necessary But Not Sufficient Role of Ontologies in Applications Requiring Personalized Content Filtering. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization, held in conjunction with The 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2006), Boston, MA, July 2006, pp. 19--30.
O. Riva and S. Toivonen. A Hybrid Model of Context-aware Service Provisioning Implemented on Smart Phones. In Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Services 2006 (ICPS’06), Lyon, France, June 2006, pp. 47--56. [PDF].
S. Toivonen, T. Pitkäranta, and O. Riva. Determining Information Usefulness in the Semantic Web: A Distributed Cognition Approach. In Proceedings of the Knowledge Markup and Semantic Annotation Workshop (SemAnnot 2005), held in conjunction with the Fourth International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2005), Galway, Ireland, November 2005, pp. 113--117. [PDF].
O. Riva, T. Pitkäranta, and S. Toivonen. Proactive Context-aware Service Provisioning for a Marine Community. Demonstration presented at the Fifth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT-05). Paris, France, July 2005.
T. Pitkäranta, O. Riva, and S. Toivonen. Designing and Implementing a System for the Provision of Proactive Context-aware Services. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Context Awareness for Proactive Systems (CAPS 2005), Helsinki, Finland, June 2005, pp. 21--30.
S. Toivonen, T. Pitkäranta, and O. Riva. DYNAMOS Poster presented at the annual TEKES FENIX seminar. Espoo, Finland, April 2005. [PDF].
S. Toivonen and G. Denker. The Impact of Context on Trustworthiness of Communications: An Ontological Approach. In Trust, Security, and Reputation on the Semantic Web workshop, held in conjunction with the Third International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2004). Hiroshima, Japan, November 2004. [PDF].
S. Toivonen. Hybrid Service Provision Model for Mobile Users: Prospects for the DYNAMOS Project. In Hyvönen, E., Kauppinen, T., Salminen, M., Viljanen, K., and Ala-Siuru, P. (Eds.): Proceedings of the Web Intelligence Symposium of the Finnish Artificial Intelligence Conference (STeP 2004), Vantaa, Finland, September 2004, pp. 183--192. [PDF].
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