The Context Awareness Module

Description
The University of Birmingham is developing a context awareness module (CAM) designed to facilitate context dependent content delivery for learners using mobile devices such as phones, PDAs, and tablet PCs. The CAM is intended to provide learners with a way to access appropriate content on their mobile devices without having to pay too much attention to searching and querying the set of all available content. The CAM incorporates the following elements:

• An object-oriented software architecture that allows the creation of customised listener objects that respond to the learner's current context of use
• A set of exclusion and ranking algorithms that provide a rating for each item of content currently available, matching the current context with meta-data on the learning content
• An inspectable and modifiable display of the current inferred context that allows the learner to view and change assumptions made by the module

The CAM and its underlying architecture are designed to support flexible re-use by non-expert users by providing a generic, re-usable architecture with the means to define customised listener objects using a structured textual description. The CAM itself is designed to sit below a delivery module, providing recommendations for content delivery. The CAM also addresses the need to provide learners with recommendations about resources (e.g. local data stores and personal files) and services (e.g. communication links to other learners and more remote data stores).

Functionalities

• Context Awareness Architecture
  The context awareness architecture is a software architecture implemented in Java. This architecture provides a framework for the creation of customised context awareness functionality through the provision of context feature listener objects that respond to the learner's current context. These features use elements in the current context to determine which content is most appropriate for the learner at the current time. This process is driven by a set of exclusion and ranking algorithms.
• Exclusion and Ranking Algorithms
  The CAM uses a process of exclusion and ranking to determine appropriate content. Exclusion is typically driven by technical constraints, e.g. the display capabilities of the learner's device, whilst ranking is more typically driven by learner goals and preferences. The system can be set-up to provide default exclusion and ranking capabilities, but these processes can be inspected and modified by both content providers and the learner themselves.
• Context Awareness Interface
  Whilst the CAM itself does not provide a graphical user interface, it is designed to interact with an interface module that can display the current inferred context and the assumptions made in inferring that context. This display also allows the learner to change the values of the context features, thus changing the inferred context and altering the content recommendations. In this way learners are given a way to inspect and control the context awareness module.

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