Next Generation Context Aware Adaptive Services

Situational information can enrich the interactions between a user and the services they wish to utilize. Such information encompasses details about the user, the physical environment and the computing resources. There are at least three key aspects in addressing this issue. Firstly, it is important to accurately capture or infer the requirements of the users in a timely fashion. Without precise information on what the users are hoping to achieve it is difficult to identify suitable services or sub-services that may fulfill (in part or fully) their information needs. Secondly, the nature of the available services determines the modes in which they may be adapted to the users’ needs. Rigid, inflexible services may be difficult to tune to the information requirements of the users. Adaptive services, on the other hand, are well suited to dynamically modifying their behavior, within defined constraints. The third issue to be addressed is the on-the-fly combination of services to meet the users’ requirements. This paper argues that current modeling (both of users and services) techniques, adaptive axes and personalization techniques used in current personalized information services, such as Adaptive Hypermedia Systems, may supply the basis for next generation adaptive collaborative services