The context awareness challenges for PIS
Abstract
ervasive Information Systems (PIS) operate in a very dynamic and complex environment. In order to couple with such an environment, PIS should adapt their behavior to this changing pervasive environment to better satisfy both users' (and stakeholders') needs and the organization's strategic goals. Context-awareness becomes then a key requirement for such systems in order to manage the effects of such dynamic and heterogeneous environments. However, the introduction of context- awareness capabilities on Pervasive Information Systems should not be limited to only some context- aware applications, considered independently or in isolated silos. It should extend to a complete ecosystem composed of a complex set of multiple applications, subsystems, business processes, and resources. Therefore, to reach the full potential of Pervasive Information Systems, these systems need a "context facility", i.e., to consider context-awareness as a "facility", a service available for every component in the Information System. In this chapter, we discuss this “context facility” vision and its challenges for context management, notably concerning the scalability issues that this vision implies.