Context Awareness and Its Applications

A US-PALA, 1) engine is being developed to facilitate services that can respond to “individual” situations (context-aware) using the behavior logs of a diverse range of “individuals”, featuring “non-discriminatory ‘individualization’”, through endeavors by OKI to realize ubiquitous services. “US-PALA” is an abbreviation for the Ubiquitous Service by Personal Activity Log Analysis and it is a means to realize context-aware services through the analyzation of behavior logs as well as by means of behavior predictions and a context estimating technology. The concept of the US-PALA engine is shown in Fig. 1. With the US-PALA engine it is feasible for a travel agency web site to offer individualized tours by way of selecting tourist attractions that may be of interest to a particular individual, based on his or her past purchases of products and web pages viewed in the past. It is also potentially possible to build services that collect information in advance and provide information considered to be necessary for operating a personal computer (behavior), based on the positional information of an employee, the operating history of the personal computer and schedules. This paper introduces an outline of the US-PALA engine, technology and service prototypes utilizing the US-PALA engine. Behavior log and context