HyCon: A Framework for Context-Aware Mobile Hypermedia

This paper introduces the notion of context-aware mobile hypermedia. Context awareness means to take the users' context such as location, time, objective, community relations, etc., into account when browsing, searching, annotating, and linking. Attributes constituting the context of the user may be sensed automatically and/or be provided by the user directly. When mobile, the user may obtain context-aware hypermedia support on a variety of small and medium sized computing platforms such as mobile phones, PDAs, tablet PCs, and laptops. This paper introduces the HyCon (HyperContext) framework with an architecture for context-aware hypermedia. The architecture includes interfaces for a sensor tier encapsulating relevant sensors and represents the hypermedia objects in structures based on the XLink and RDF standards. A prototype called the HyConExplorer created with the framework is presented, and it is illustrated how the classical hypermedia features such as browsing, searching, annotating, linking, and collaboration are supported in context-aware hypermedia. Among the features of the HyConExplorer are real-time location-based searches via Google collecting hits within a specified nimbus around the user's GPS position. Finally, the use of scenarios for and evaluation of the use of the HyConExplorer in public school projects are discussed.