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The proliferation of sensor technology, along with advances in wireless communication and
mobile devices, allow for context-aware applications. Those applications take into account
the context of real world entities, such as a user's current location, physical environment,
or even activity. They are able to act upon and adapt to changes in the real world and
select and present information depending on the application's context. Since almost all
application domains can benefit from context information, we envision most applications to
be context-aware in the near future.
Billions of sensors located in our physical environment collect a huge amount of context
information. This information will be fed into numerous spatial context models building the
basis for context-aware applications. The models may include stationary objects, like
streets or buildings, as well as mobile objects, such as people or vehicles. The spatial
models may differ in various ways, e.g., in topographical or topological nature, in different
levels of detail, or in coverage of different areas and aspects of the real world.
For both economic and technical reasons, it is highly desirable for context information to be
shared by a wide variety of applications. We envision - in analogy to the WWW - a World Wide
Space, which provides the conceptual and technological framework for integrating and sharing
context models. It is open in the sense that any commercial and non-commercial provider can
"place" context models into this space. The collection of context models is federated and
leads to a large scale context model, offering a global and consistent view on the context
data. The federation allows for complex spatial queries, including continuous evaluation and
stream-based processing. If the context model is enriched by temporal concepts, applications
can query not only the current model state, but also states of the past or even predicted
ones. To protect context data, application-specific views can be defined for individually
controlling model access. We envision the World Wide Space to be the common basis for future
context- aware applications.
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