Research issues in developing a platform for spatial-aware applications

Applications that take into account the location or the context of their users are growing in importance. Examples for such applications are "Guide" [Davis et al. 1998], an interactive tourist guide developed at Lancaster University or Stick-e-Notes (University of Kent) [Brown 1995], a kind of virtual PostIt, that allows to annotate a context with an object (e.g. a notice). Context-aware applications are developed isolated from each other. No sharing of components or interaction between the different applications is possible. We propose an open platform for such applications. Such a platform would allow an easier implementation of such applications and allow a sharing of components. In the development of such a platform a number of issues from various research areas arise. In the interdisciplinary Nexus project we are currently developing such a platform.The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: The basic idea of the Nexus project will be discussed in the next section. Section 3 will introduce the proposed architecture of the Nexus platform. In the following section we will take a look at specific research topics. We finally conclude the paper in section 5.