Visiting Studio resident David Martin, from CICtourGUNE, the Centre for Cooperative Research in Tourism suggests that information and services personalisation is essential for an optimal user experience. This customisation becomes even more important in mobile scenarios, where users have to interact with small devices and they usually require very specific information at a given time. For this to happen services must be able to acquire data about the user’s context on the move, process it in order to identify the user’s situation at a given time and place, and finally adapt the available functionality to that situation.

The development of services that use context data to personalize their behavior is complex. Data coming from distributed sources has to be acquired, processed and managed. One of the main tasks in the development process is the definition of user situations, which are best defined by people with expertise in the application domain, who usually do not have technical skills. 

Existing context-aware development toolkits are for programmers, so non-technical domain experts cannot participate in the development process. David will introduce his new work, Context Cloud, which aims to address this gap in terms of end-user programmability of Context-Aware development toolkits. The web front-end provides several dialogs in order to manage context data, involving the creation of a context model, access to the identified context data sources and definition of situations based on rules. A situation-driven methodology is also proposed in order to guide the development process.

This Lunchtime Talk is part of Open Studio Friday, which takes place at the Studio every week.

Do you want to find out what is going on at the Pervasive Media Studio? Are you interested in meeting our residents, talking about a specific project or curious about pervasive media? Why not pack a sandwich and join us for one of our Lunchtime Talks and Open Studio Friday.

Lunchtime Talks are informal presentations by Studio residents and associates. They normally take place at 1pm on Friday, are free and open to everybody who’s interested in what we do.

After the Talk, we also invite you to stay with us for the afternoon to continue the conversation or work on your own projects. We provide chairs, tables, wireless and a great space. You bring what you need to work with (laptop/mobile). Our open afternoons close at 5pm.

Let us know if you’d like a tour of the new space and we'll be happy to show you around! Send an email to admin@pmstudio.co.uk