• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.27-41
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• 2007

Nowadays the context-aware systems have been regarded as a promising opportunity to create differentiated e-marketplaces. Context-aware system aims to provide personalized services by understanding the user's current situation which is automatically acquired from the context data. This aim naturally leads us to a motivation to evaluate to what extent a system is context-aware. Even though lots of endeavors have stated about the level of context-aware system, a structured evaluation has been so far very rare. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to propose a two-phased methodology for assessing context-aware systems. In the first phase, we perform a requisite analysis to discriminate a context-aware system from general or context-based systems. Once an information system is recognized as context-aware system, then level of collaboration, mobility and embeddedness is derived to determine the level of context-aware system in the second phase. To do so, device collaboration diagram (DCD) is proposed to visualize the system architecture. Moreover, readiness and level of system are Jointly considered in the phase to provide a development strategy for each context-aware system development project. To show the feasibility of the idea proposed in this paper, legacy context-aware systems are actually analyzed and evaluated.