Web Services enabling context-aware applications: lessons learned by integrating e-learning applications

Context-aware applications assist users' everyday tasks by adapting their behavior based on context information obtained from instrumented environments. Context is any relevant information describing entities in a user-computer interaction (e.g. user location). The design and implementation of high-quality context management software is an area of active research. We have described elsewhere the Context Kernel, a Web Service that manages context information on behalf of applications. In this paper we present a case study of how the Context Kernel has been used to integrate a suite of e-learning applications. We show how the Web Services approach allowed applications to seamlessly exchange context on the Web through a uniform context representation schema. We also present the lessons we learned from integrating e-learning applications via Web Services.