Nowadays mobile devices are equipped with sensors and hardware elements capable of capturing many types of information from the real world, location, orientation, light level, temperature, etc. This information is known in some areas as context information. For years many mobile native applications use context information to support specific tasks. Most of the applications developed with traditional technologies don’t have mechanisms to use most types of context information. This paper presents a lightweight approach to use context information in conventional web applications. The proposal defines a set of highly customizable XML tags, and included web applications that can express specific requests for context information. A web browser designed following the proposed specification is responsible for processing the XML tags and send the context information to the web application using web services. In this paper we present the proposed architecture, then develop and evaluate a GPS navigator application based on this proposal.

Web applications, Web services, Web browser, Mobile devices, smartphone