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An application of a context-aware file system

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Abstract

Ubiquitous computing environments stretch the requirements of traditional infrastructures used to facilitate the development of applications. Activities are often supported by collections of applications, some of which are automatically launched with little or no human intervention. This task-driven environment challenges existing application construction and data management techniques. In this paper, we describe a file system that organises application data based on contextual information, imports user data based on its physical presence, and supports format conversions to accommodate device context. We describe several applications that we have developed within our ubiquitous computing infrastructure and show how they leverage the novel features of our file system to simplify their complexity.

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Notes

  1. The presence of a user may be detected in several ways, including finger print matching, RF badges, cameras, electronic rings, etc.

  2. For the remainder of this paper, attributes will refer to both properties and context.

  3. ACDs are scripts that allow us to assemble distributed applications by instantiating components on different machines and linking them together.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Manuel Romàn for numerous discussions regarding the design and application of our system within the Gaia environment, in addition to the implementation of the Windows Explorer file selection feature. This research is also supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, NSF 0086094 and NSF 99-72884 CISE.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA

    Christopher K. Hess & Roy H. Campbell

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  1. Christopher K. Hess
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  2. Roy H. Campbell
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Correspondence to Roy H. Campbell.

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Hess, C.K., Campbell, R.H. An application of a context-aware file system. Pers Ubiquit Comput 7, 339–352 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-003-0250-y

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