User role in defining and utilizing contexts

Context-awareness has much potential in mobile services as it facilitates many features that ease use by providing contextually relevant information and services easily available. Often context-awareness is seen as a system level feature that is based on monitoring users and the environment and learning from the user’s past behaviour. However, the users could have a stronger role in utilizing contexts as our ex-periences show. We have implemented a context-aware platform that aims to enable flexibility for users in defining contexts as well as in combining of contexts, objects and messages. We have also studied how tags and different objects in the environment give possibilities to user initiated context-aware behav-iour. Based on the experiences we present examples of giving the users a stronger role in creating, activating and sharing contexts as well as in defining context-aware behaviour of the system. We also in-troduce two application examples where user role is emphasized: context-aware messaging and contex-tual service packages.