ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Many claims have been made about the potential benefits of mobile, contextsensitive computing. The initial focus was on “follow-me” applications in which the presentation and dissemination of information was tailored to the users’ tasks as they moved from one working environment to another. More recently, attention has shifted from systems that sense the location of users toward architectures that help users sense systems and other objects in their environment. At the same time, we have seen the increasing availability of personal digital assistants (PDAs) with Internet access, for instance, through the 802.11 protocol or through cellular telephone networks. One consequence of this is that the Web has become an attractive infrastructure for the provision of context-sensitive services using a broad range of sensing technologies. The Glasgow Context Server (GCS) is intended to help interface designers validate the claimed benefits of location-sensing, location-disclosing and environmentsensing applications.
