Today at the lab seminar, we had a presentation from Andreas Zimmermann (Fraunhofer Institute of Sankt Augustin, Germany). Andreas presented the architecture of his 'context management' framework:
Context Management Framework De-contextualization is death for any information. Context-awareness is the key asset in future information services for Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing. In ubiquitous computing, the user will be interrupted in performing a task only if the information is relevant to the task or highly important in the situation to justify the interrupt. The information selection and presentation therefore should be adapted to the user and his current context of use. Nowadays, uncounted Content-Management Systems provide access to a large amount of information, but without context, information is just data. Indeed, contextualization currently lacks a few properties making it transparent and applicable for everyone. Context-Management as a novel and unified framework will hide complex technical details from developers and end users while developing context-aware systems. This framework provides software packages to support developers in integrating context-awareness in ubiquitous computing environments and tools for the management of content combined with context information.
Then he exemplified it with 3 applications: an intelligent advertisement board, a museum guide and a treasure-hunt game.
A good summary of this can be found in this paper: Applications of a Context-Management System by Andreas Zimmermann, Andreas Lorenz and Marcus Specht (proceedings of Context'05).