Social context: supporting interaction awareness in ubiquitous environments

In ubiquitous computing environments, certain entities (or actors) often need to interact with each other in achieving a joint goal in a dynamically changing context. To perform such interactions in a seamless manner, the actors need to be aware of not only their physical context (e.g. location) but also their changing relationships with respect to the particular task or goal. The latter interaction-oriented context, which we refer to as social context, has significant impacts on the way actors manage their adaptive behavior. However, very little research has focused on supporting such social context in ubiquitous environments. This paper presents our novel approach to modeling and realizing social context. Social context is modeled as a managed composition of loosely-coupled roles with their interaction relationships expressed as contracts. In addition, it is modeled from an individual actor's perspective to allow for possible differences in the actors' perception of the relationships. The social contexts of an actor are externalized from the actor itself to achieve easy management of the actors' adaptive behavior concerning interaction. A layered system architecture is introduced to realize the approach and demonstrate the development of automotive telematics systems that are physically and socially context-aware