Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Context Awareness for Proactive Systems, CAPS 2006

Proactive computing systems are connected to the physical world by means of sensors and actuators which are used to both measure and manipulate the physical surroundings. The gathered environmental data serve proactive systems as stimuli to which they respond in terms of providing users with appropriate resources, information, and services. In order to fulfil this task, proactive systems need to and benefit from taking users’ contexts into account, i. e. using the gathered sensor data to infer users’ state, activities, goals, and so on and to adjust their proactive behaviour accordingly. In addition, mobile and pervasive environments have turned out to be a promising application area for proactive systems. Deploying proactive systems in such rapidly changing environments enforces the need to make them context-aware. Context awareness in proactive systems opens up a lot of novel opportunities, however, it also poses new challenges upon proactive computing technology. The major objective of the CAPS 2006 workshop has been to study and explore these challenges and proposed ways of meeting them. This includes research on modelling and representing context in proactive computing systems, frameworks and architectures for context handling, sensor and actuator management, context reasoning, learning, and prediction as well as on modelling, recognising and fulfilling user demand. The proceedings of the CAPS 2006 Workshop on Context Awareness for Proactive Systems contain fourteen papers describing latest results from science and industry as well as two keynotes and an abstract of the tutorial on recent developments in middleware standardization for mobile computing.