A rule-based approach towards context-aware user notification services

Pervasive Computing is the vision of technology that is invisibly embedded in our natural surroundings. Users are offered unobtrusive services that require minimal attention. In this paper the Awareness and Notification Service (ANS) is presented that enables to rapidly build applications that inform users about their environment. Additionally, the service offers notifications tailored to the user's preferences and current context. ANS takes a rule based approach based on the Event-Condition-Action pattern. Users specify when and what should be notified to them by using a convenient ANS rule language. This flexible mechanism allows to rapidly develop applications that provide context-aware notifications without the need to write programming code to activate rules, nor to implement personalized notifications.