Context Awareness in Enterprise Systems Design

Context awareness concept has evolved over time both in terms of associated technology and of domains of application and is becoming a key issue in designing systems with intelligent behavior, as the capacity of adaptation to environmental changes and contexts is one of the definitory attributes of intelligence. This concept has so far mainly been addressed as process-oriented, thus justifying the large number of existing approaches. However, the formal ones are rather few. It is the objective of this paper to offer a survey covering as large as possible a number of application domains, as a first step in elaborating a set of formally-based guidelines in addressing the topic of context awareness.