Categorising Context and Using Short Term Contextual Information to Obtain Long Term Context

Context Aware computing has been one of the most challenging and interesting developments from the past decade. But as it turns out, context is a poorly used source of information which, most of the times is utilized inefficiently in Ubiquitous Computing Environments due to impoverished understanding of the term. To address this, in this paper, we first discuss how existing context aware systems exploit context and our own categorization of context. Then, we define two concepts - long term context and short term context. We discuss how they can be obtained and how their importance varies in different scenarios. They help in understanding context in a much better way and are necessary for an accurate data provisioning. Also, we introduce a method of estimating long term context using short term context patterns over a time duration.