Informing Context to Support Adaptive Services Alexander O’Connor and Vincent Wade Knowledge and Data Engineering Group, Department of Computer Science, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland {oconnoat, Vincent.Wade}@cs.tcd.ie Abstract. A common trend in modern applications is the move towards more mobile, adaptive, customisable software. The evolution of software from static, invariant tools for narrow portions of a task to adaptive, open interaction frameworks is embodied in the use of a variety of tech- nologies for creating a reconfigurable application. Perhaps the two most important techniques are Adaptive architectures and Ubiquitious Com- puting. However, many techniques employed merging these two technolo- gies to form the vision of a truly ubiquitous, adaptive environment have so far failed to take full account of the expressive quality of both context and adaptivity. This paper presents a new, semantic interopration-based approach to creating context-informed adaptive applications that make maximum use of the rich content that can be found in both technologies. 1 Introduction Adaptive Applications are characterised by their variable behaviour in response to their information models[1]. Adaptivity allows for applicationsto make consid- erable changes for personalisation and customisation preferences as defined by the user and the content being adapted. This mechanism is extremely powerful in providing tailored presentation of information to the user. Adaptivity also permits this class of applications to leverage Contextual infor- mation very effectively, employing additional axes of information to better inform customisation and personalisation. Many of the current approaches to Contex- tual support for Adaptivity are, however, focused on a mechanism whereby the application itself does a large proportion of the work by querying external sources of information and integrating the results by treating contextual data as separate and distinct. By placing the responsibility for managing and querying and inte- grating context on the application, this approach can place extra burden on the application programmer, who must design an integration strategy for Context, and on the application itself which potentially makes the information models larget and more complex. This paper presents a Context-Informed approach to enriching Adaptive ap- plications. In this architecture, the adaptive application is served by a contextual broker, which enriches the application based on a broader spectrum of concerns, V. Wade, H. Ashman, and B. Smyth (Eds.): AH 2006, LNCS 4018, pp. 366–369, 2006. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006