Community Services

The FOKUS Community Solutions for Converged Media Environments

Context Watcher

The Context Watcher is a mobile application that enables mobile phone users to easily and unobtrusively share personal context data such as their location, heart rate, speed, or view, with their mutual consent. Not only can the data be shared, it can also be used as input for information services, to adapt applications to the context, or to automatically derive daily patterns and situational information, such as ‘meeting with a supervisor’, ‘is a regular visitor’ or ‘having the best condition of all your friends’. The application is built atop of a context management framework, a generic approach enabling context discovery, exchange and reasoning. In the context management framework, different entities, context providers, are exposed to and interact via the internet.
The available information depends on the context providers that are connected to the Context Watcher application, and is certainly not limited to location only. The Context Watcher application has been implemented using a modular architecture that allows dynamic configuration of the used components..
The Context Watcher application is able to record information about the user’s

• Location (based on GSM cell and optionally on GPS)
• Mood and other subjective pieces of context information based on user input, e.g., availability or perception of safety
• Activities, meetings, and daily patterns (based on clustering and information fusion)
• Body data (based on heart and foot sensors)
• Weather (based on a location-inferred remote weather context provider)
• Visual data (pictures, videos tagged with contextual data)

The Context Watcher support social networks, context tagging and life blogging:

Social networks
Users can invite other users to become their buddies. Initially, new buddies will be shown in their contact list as ‘requested’ with no extra information. As soon as a buddy approves the request from their contact list, a relation is established and context information can flow over that relation. Then, depending on privacy settings, users can watch other user’s status, activities, mood, location, pictures and videos they created using the mobile device, etc.

Context tagging
All gathered context information can be used 1) to adapt the behavior of application running on the mobile phone (e.g., prioritizing the favorite applications depending on location cluster), 2) to serve as input for information services (maps, points of interest) or other context providers, and 3) to tag multimedia content recorded with the mobile device. This is mobile Web 2.0!

Life blogging
One of the next steps is to generate daily reports from the different streams of context information and the pictures taken during the day, and to present them in a format which is enjoyable and informative to a human reader, with cross links between the summaries for easy navigation and categorization. This way it is possible to easily browse your own life, e.g., by finding those other days that you met buddy Bernd, and recollecting what you did together. Context Watcher creates awareness in a large audience about the possibilities of context-aware computing in the everyday life of now, e.g., by demonstrating the ease and usefulness of life blogging and picture tagging using automatically recorded context information pictures, videos, location and status of persons can be watched in the IPTV environment, based on user context access visualized in Google Earth.

Context Watcher Architectural Overview

Context Watcher Screenshots

Context Watcher Users Location, Photos, etc.

OpenKiez

The purpose of OpenKiez is to support local neighbourhood communication among residents of a small urban district (Kiez). Participants are given the opportunity to offer knowledge, support, goods, etc to their neighbourhood and to get in contact with each other.
OpenKiez provides a means of public communication through “Theme Subscription Lists” where users can post offers or requests. A notification mechanism alerts about postings based on individual interests and preferences.
Referencing a posting the user can contact the sender over different communication “channels” as there are:

• Send a text message
• Send a voice message
• Place a telephone call
• Open a text conversation (chat)

The OpenKiez infrastructure tracks and outlines most popular themes, most active participants, best rated contributions. These are shown as “tag clouds” on the user’s device as well as on public displays (the Dashboard) installed in popular places.
OpenKIEZ is based on the Service4All (S4ALL) Platform which offers features like semantic service description, visual service creation, service execution and an on-device extension to keep a connection to the mobile clients running OpenKIEZ.


OpenKIEZ based on S4All Platform

OpenKIEZ HomeScreen