Delivery Context Access for the Mobile Web

Abstract

The advent of advanced mobile devices has ushered in a new generation of intelligent adaptive applications. With the mobile web gaining widespread prominence, there is a need to provide more intuitive and interactive services that are customized across a wide range of devices with varying capabilities. Delivery context refers to a set of attributes that characterizes the capabilities of the access mechanism, the preferences of the user and other aspects of the context into which an adaptation service is to be performed. Adaptation services can rely on delivery context information providing customized content. Adaptation can take place on three fronts: content adaptation, presentation adaptation and service adaptation. For applications and services to perform adaptation, there has to be an efficient and standardized mechanism for accessing delivery context information, especially for the mobile web. Towards this goal, a framework servicing mobile web for delivery context access has been developed. The consumer API part of the framework, developed jointly with industry partners, called Delivery Context: Interfaces (DCI) is undergoing standardization within World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and had reached candidate recommendation status in 2006. The framework addresses both consumer applications that use context data and provider services that provide context data. In addition to the framework design and implementation, examples of adaptive web applications utilizing delivery context information are presented. Since context provision is as important as context consumption, details of two context provision services are also described. The first is a SIP-based context provision service and the latter is a conceptual design of an agent-based context provision service. The work presented is concluded by providing insights into future extensions and research aspects needed for successful and widespread adoption of the framework.

Keywords

Delivery Context Interfaces, Mobile Web, Context Models, Context Access, Web security, Agents and context