Context-Aware Artefacts: Current State and Open Questions from an IS Perspective

Context and context-awareness are being investigated in pervasive computing (PC) and human-computer interaction (HCI) for quite some time. More recently, context-awareness has also become a topic of interest in information systems (IS). Mobile services are among the topics that have shown to be of particular interest. Motivated by this growing interest we investigate what notions of context-awareness have been implemented in computational artefacts and whether these implementations actually meet the definitions of context that were identified as starting points in the respective research. Results of this investigation suggest that many implementations of context-awareness are driven by (technical) feasibility rather than actual user needs. Business applications, however, should be driven by user needs. Furthermore such applications need to be based on sound concepts and technologies. Our findings, however, suggest that there are issues that need to be addressed before we can expect full context-awareness. Based on these findings we discuss what this means to developers looking for technical foundations for their services. We also outline work that needs to be done in order to better understand context-awareness and its applicability in IS domains