2008 International Workshop on Context-Aware Pervasive Communities: Infrastructures, Services and Applications (CAPC 2008)

Held in Conjunction with Pervasive 2008

Sponsored by the EII Taskforce on Context-Aware Computing

19 May 2008, Sydney Australia

Workshop Aims & Scope:

The pervasive computing vision calls for computation, sensing and networking to be ubiquitous, whether with users or embedded into everyday living environments. A result of ubiquitous networking and computational ability is to form digital boundaries around entities. As such, communities, whether geographically transcending or based at a place, formed with a priori agreements or ad hoc via simply a collocation of interacting devices members, transient or long-living, can form a digital matrix or space in which its participants interact, provide services or utilize services.

Participants of such communities may be aware of the context and situations of individuals, the collective, or subgroups. Groups may be aware of other groups, or individuals being aware of groups or groups being aware of particular individuals. The levels of awareness, what one wants others to be aware of and what one wants to be aware of concerning others varies from application to application. Standardized techniques and protocols are needed to control such awareness as well as to manage such awareness, e.g., a standardized manner for a user (or an application on the user's mobile device) to access additional context information available from the surrounding infrastructure from the mobile device. Also, such context information should be shareable and understandable, perhaps based on underlying ontologies. In general, standardizing interfaces to place-based virtual communities can encourage widespread deployment and global scale roaming applications. Such awareness aids in forming service ecologies within a locality and helps processes, be it business processes, governmental processes, or tasks and processes in everyday living. These processes can be streamlined in the context of formed communities, or be dynamically tailored according to contexts.

This workshop aims to provide a forum bringing together computing researchers and practitioners to discuss key enabling technologies, technical challenges, solutions, and applications for context-aware communities and processes.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Computational and information infrastructure for pervasive communities
• Pervasive processes for aware communities
• Middleware and service platforms for aware communities
• Proposed standards for pervasive communities and processes
• Novel applications based on pervasive communities
• Intelligent agent systems for enabling pervasive communities
• Pervasive communities for the enterprise
• Service-oriented computing to enable aware pervasive communities
• Ontologies for context and situation modelling in pervasive communities
• Case studies of context-aware pervasive communities.