Overview The Context Toolkit aims at facilitating the development and deployment of context-aware applications. By context, we mean environmental information that is part of an application's operating environment and that can be sensed by the application. The Context Toolkit consists of context widgets and a distributed infrastructure that hosts the widgets. Context widgets are software components that provide applications with access to context information while hiding the details of context sensing. In the same way GUI widgets insulate applications from some presentation concerns, context widgets insulate applications from context acquisition concerns. To summarize, the services of the Context Toolkit are:
encapsulation of sensors
access to context data through a network API
abstraction of context data through interpreters
sharing of context data through a distributed infrastructure
