Between location awareness and aware locations: where to put the intelligence

Location awareness is a key ingredient to many applications of mobile devices. Devices with the ability to determine their own position in space can retrieve, filter or present information depending on this position. There are, however, different ways to look at this situation resulting in different distributions of computational resources. A strongly simplified description model will be introduced and a number of existing systems, from both research and industry, will be analyzed according to this model. With a view to scalability in ubiquitous computing worlds, we will examine the tradeoffs with respect to putting more computational effort and design wits into the environment and infrastructure or into the actual mobile device. Some of the ideas presented here were discussed in a paper at the first workshop on Artificial Intelligence in mobile devices, AIMS 2000.