I am a student of computer science at the technical University of Karlsruhe in Germany. Now I am doing my master thesis at the Telecooperation Office (TecO).

I will finish my studies in September 2001.

Overview

Whenever somebody wants to start a conversation when meeting people face-to-face, he can take the context and the situation of both communication partners into account. He can decide whether the situation of the receiver is appropriate for a communication or not by knowing the importance of his message.

But using a phone it is more difficult. Normally you cannot see the communication partner and you have to estimate his situation/context. Because of the phone number you may differ where the communication partner is (e.g. when there exists one phone number at work and one at home). But you do not know whether the communication partner wants to talk now (e.g. he wants to watch a movie with his whole family and does not want to be disturbed).

Since a lot of people have got mobile phones, it is even more difficult to estimate the situation of the communication partner because it is more difficult to estimate where he is.

To solve this problem it would be a good aproach to exchange context informations between the two communication partners. The receiver can use WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) to send the context information to a server. When somebody wants to communicate with him, he sends a request to the server via WAP and gets the context information of the receiver. Then he can decide what to do (call, leave a message, call later). This equals nearly a face-to-face communication, because the transmiter gets the context of the receiver and the receiver knows the importance of the call when the caller start a communication while the context was "do not disturb"

But not only for getting context information you can use WAP. Moreover you can use it to get your address-book from the internet. You will not have multiple address-books (one at the PC at home, one at the PC at work, one at the mobile phone, etc.) that each must be updated when you make a change at one of them. You will have one address-book in the WWW and the possibility to configurate it using a normal WWW-Browser. If you want to know an address you not enter the local address book of your mobile phone but you connect to the WWW - using WAP - and get the information. There you may also get a picture of someone you have searched in the address book.

I trie to make an approache to solve problems like the problems above. Therefore it is helpful to use development software. For more information see here.

Here is an adressbook configuration site. The informations can later be displayed at a WAP-Browser. You can use this Phonebook with a mobile phone using WAP under: "http://wap.teco.edu/~tanjev".

Here you can set your context information.

On my Web Portal you can use a prototyp of an online phonebook.

Some Slides from a short introduction to my master thesis.

To get an overview about new services, user interfaces and applications people would like to have on their mobile phones we made a study. You can download the full questionnaire here.