Context-Awareness and User Profiling in Mobile Environments

The evolution of mobile communication systems to 3G and beyond introduces requirements for flexible, customized, and ubiquitous multimedia service provision to mobile users. One must be able to know at any given time the network status, the user location, the profiles of the various entities (users, terminals, network equipment, services) involved and the policies that are employed within the system. Namely, the system must be able to cope with a large amount of context information. The present paper focuses on location and context awareness in service provisioning and proposes a flexible and innovative model for user profiling. The innovation is based on the enrichment of common user profiling architectures to include location and other contextual attributes, so that enhanced adaptability and personalization can be achieved. For each location and context instance an associated User Profile instance is created and hence, service provisioning is adapted to the User Profile instance that better apply to the current context. The generic model, the structure and the content of this location- and context-sensitive User Profile, along with some related implementation issues, are discussed.