Proceedings of the CHI 2000 Workshop on "The What, Who, Where, When, Why and How of Context-Awareness"

Abstract

At the CHI 2000 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (April 1-6, 2000), a workshop was held on "The What, Who, Where, When, and How of Context-Awareness". Context-awareness is widely thought to be an important enabling technology for developing ubiquitous, handheld and wearable computer applications. It describes the ability of a computing device or program to sense, react to, or adapt to the environment in which it is running. In order to understand better how we can use context and facilitate the building of context-aware applications, we need to understand more fully what constitutes a context-aware application and what context is. This workshop attempted to address these issues by asking the six "W" questions of context-awareness: 'what, who, where, when, and why?'. These five questions underpin the sixth meta-question of 'how', for example 'how do we build context-aware applications'?