Personalization and context aware services: A middleware perspective

The basic goal of any context aware system is to provide some proactive services adopting users' context. However, often in real life proactive behaviors create complex problems. The end users of the system have an implicit understanding of the system. If the context aware behavior of the system conflicts with their understandings and reacts differently from users' expectation applications success ratio reduces radically. So, personalization is a crucial factor for the success of the proactive applications. In this paper we discuss this particular aspect from a middleware perspective. Initially we present a requirement analysis and propose a classification scheme for structural representation of preference information in proactive systems. Then we present a middleware, part of which exploits this classification to support application developers to facilitate the end users with the flexibility to personalize the context-aware services. This facility stems entirely from the middleware and is independent from the applications.