Patent ID: 7751944

Claim:
A context-aware system comprising: a computer configured to be mounted in a vehicle, the computer comprising one or more processors and computer-readable media associated with the one or more processors; one or more applications resident on the computer-readable media and configured to be executed by the one or more processors; one or more context providers operably associated with the computer and configured to provide context information for use in determining a vehicle context, the one or more context providers being further configured to receive the context information from sources remote from the vehicle; a first hierarchical tree structure resident on the computer-readable media and having multiple nodes each being associated with a context; a second hierarchical tree structure resident on the computer-readable media and linked to at least one node of the first hierarchical tree structure, the second hierarchical tree structure including organization-specific information about an organization that is associated with the second hierarchical tree structure; a context service module configured to: receive the context information from the one or more context providers; determine a vehicle context by accessing the first hierarchical tree structure and traversing at least one of said multiple nodes; and obtain the organization-specific information about the organization by traversing the second hierarchical tree structure, the organization being associated with the vehicle context; at least one of the one or more applications being configured to present the organization-specific information to a vehicle user; and a behavior engine operably associated with the computer and configured to, responsive to the vehicle context that is determined by the context service, adjust a behavior of the one or more applications to cause the one or more applications to behave in a manner that is consistent with the vehicle context.