Meta data to support context aware mobile applications

Abstract

The greater sophistication and availability of mobile computing devices is enabling the application of computing to new tasks and applications to be experienced in a wide range of contexts. To facilitate such applications it is necessary to adapt the applications and the data they display to operate within the limitations of the context of use, take advantage of the strengths of the devices and best support the users in their tasks. A part of the solution to this issue is the description of the data available to the applications. Meta data may describe the structure and properties of information and data. We achieve this by separating the semantic elements of the information from the syntactic variants which realise them in order to form documents. In this paper we describe a new meta data model which can encode this description. We provide example meta data and illustrate how this may lead to better application usability than current simplistic or constrained approaches, through contextual mediation.