If context management is properly added as a new capability to your mobile phone, it will soon become your most valuable assistant, educator, and confidant. The big picture for the new context management paradigm, which supersedes content management by leaps and bounds, includes a triangulation of time, space, and user preferences to pinpoint the needs and particular wants of the mobile consumer.

In this interim report on their research program, Cadenas et al. present a framework and methodology for achieving a context-aware system, based on knowledge representation and rule-based reasoning. In this case, knowledge representation means a combination of already-existing ontologies and domain-specific heuristics. The difficult handling of domain-specific reasoning is evident in the provided use case. The potential interpretations of a tourism application show what a long way we need to go, to achieve a context management paradigm that we can all agree on.

The best aspect of the paper is that it presents a bird’s-eye view of a subject area that involves a gargantuan assortment of tasks in knowledge representation, behavioral psychology, and computer science, to even come close to a workable solution. Criticism can be applied when it comes to the paper’s readability, both syntactically and thematically. Furthermore, the specific claims and hypotheses that this paper contributes to the state of the art of context management are not immediately apparent.

The context-sensitive paradigm, as part of pervasive computing, is rapidly advancing. In the meantime, the mobile phone user will continue to depend on clever applications with location-based services, to find the latest hidden dinner spot. One can only hope that it is satellite guidance and not tower triangulation that gets one there, lest one arrive three blocks off the mark.