enabling group-awareness through context-based service provisioning
Platforms that support group-awareness and group interaction enable mobile users to have a rich knowledge about the whereabouts and activities of people with whom they work or live or have a shared interest. Context-based groupawareness enables members of a loosely-formed group to maintain the right balance between autonomy, privacy, and awareness. Previous work in this regard focuses on understanding the dynamics of groups and group members; on recognizing and sharing contexts; and on tackling scalability concerns. Little work has been done on the dynamic provision of service that are not foreseen when a group is formed. This aspect is rather an essential aspect, as it enables members to exercise autonomy and freedom. In this paper, we present a conceptual architecture consisting of core services and runtime services. The core services are the minimum amount of services required to create and maintain a group. The runtime services provide support that are specific to a group, and can be searched, installed, configured and integrated with the core services. The architecture has been implemented and deployed on a mobile device.
group-awareness group interaction conceptual architecture pervasive services modeling prototyping context-awareness