"Take me with you!": A case study of context-aware application integrating cyber and physical spaces

Context-awareness is one of the exciting research topics in a ubiquitous computing environment, which is expected to create some new businesses and/or services by using sensors and actuators. Especially, context information from cyber space allows a system to extend its information space both temporalily and spatially. However, many applications do not regard context information from cyber space as a information source of future tense. This keeps applications from being aware of a wide variety of context. We have developed a system software "ContextDistilleriy", which enables an application developer to obtain context information incrementally without taking account of descriptive information, meta-context information. Next, we have built an application "Take me with you!", which exemplifies the notion of physical/cyber space integration. This paper reports a case study of the application development. Discussions of findings through the application development are presented. Moreover, an architecture for realizing more practical notions of context-awareness is introduced based on the discussions.