Contextproxy : a location-aware HTTP proxy server to support web based context-aware services and applications

Abstract

The pervasion of computing in our physical world promises more than the ubiquitous availability of computing resources; totally new and exciting interaction schemes are to be explored. Context-awareness, one of the most important aspects of ubiquitous computing, enables applications that make use of their users’ context to provide dynamically adapting information and services to their users or to other applications. Although the technological infrastructure to support ubiquitous and context-aware applications is being deployed rapidly, the standards and the best practices for the interactions of various components in a context-aware application are still missing. In our work we have developed a location-aware HTTP proxy server, called ContextProxy that runs on the popular Symbian platform. ContextProxy acts as a standard HTTP proxy server from the client application’s perspective but it augments the service request of the client with the available location information while submitting the request to the service provider. This allows the existing nomadic applications to immediately become locationaware if they can be configured to make use of a standard HTTP proxy which is a common scheme for web based applications. And also it is possible to write new nomadic applications without considering the context-awareness aspect at the service requestor level. The contextual information added by ContextProxy can then be utilized by the service provider to dynamically adapt its services according to the service requestor’s context.