Context-aware Provision of Advanced Internet Services * Raffaella Grieco Delfina Malandrino Universit` a degli Studi di Salerno, Italy Dipartimento di Informatica ed Applicazioni “R.M. Capocelli” 84081 Baronissi (SA), Italy {delmal, rafgri}@dia.unisa.it Francesca Mazzoni Universit` a degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione 41100 Modena, Italy mazzoni.francesca@unimore.it Daniele Riboni Universit` a degli Studi di Milano, Italy Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione 20135 Milano, Italy riboni@dico.unimi.it Abstract The pervasive and mobile computing scenario is charac- terized by the heterogeneity of devices used to access ser- vices, and by frequent changes in the user’s context. This paper presents the integration of two existing frameworks into a context-aware content provisioning system oriented to mobile users. External Web contents can be automati- cally tailored according to a wide range of context data, in- cluding device capabilities, available bandwidth, location, user preferences. The tailoring process is human interven- tion free. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of our solu- tion, we have developed a prototype location-based service that takes advantage of this architecture. 1 Introduction In the Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing era, the trend is to provide Web content and multimedia applica- tions by taking into account four important requirements: anytime-anywhere access to any data through any device and by using any access network. As a consequence, it is in- creasingly significant to provide tailored content efficiently, in order to address the mismatch between the rich multime- dia content that is widely available and the limited client capabilities and available bandwidth. Furthermore, users feel the need of personalized content that matches their per- sonal preferences, considering not only device capabilities * This work has been partially supported by Italian MIUR (FIRB ”Web- Minds” project N. RBNE01WEJT 005). and network status, but a wider notion of context, which in- cludes -among other things- their current location, activity, and surrounding environment. One of the current research topics in distributed sys- tems is how to extend the traditional client/server computa- tional paradigm in order to allow the provision of intelligent and advanced services. To this aim, new actors are intro- duced into the WWW scene, in the form of intermediaries that act on the HTTP data flow exchanged between client and server. Several examples of intermediary adaptation systems exist in literature, such as iMobile by AT&T [7], whose main goal is to provide personalized mobile ser- vices; the TACC infrastructure [4], whose main goal is to support the dynamic deployment of transformation mod- ules into proxy-based components; RabbIT 1 and Privoxy 2 , whose main goal is to provide functionalities such as text and image transcoding, removing of cookies, GIF anima- tions, advertisement, Java Applets, etc. Many of these sys- tems provide adaptation functionalities without taking into account user’s preferences and context information. In order to support the provisioning of this type of ser- vices, we have defined and experimented with an architec- ture that builds on top of two existing frameworks: the Scal- able Intermediary Software Infrastructure (SISI) [3], and the Context Aggregation and REasoning (CARE) [1] mid- dleware. Our proposal is supported by a running imple- mentation, and by a prototype service aimed at providing location-based support to mobile users. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 1 http://rabbit-proxy.sourceforge.net 2 http://www.privoxy.org