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The Context Toolkit (Dey, Abowd, and Salber, 2001 [this special issue]) is only one of many possible architectures for supporting context-aware applications. In this essay, we look at the tradeoffs involved with a service infrastructure approach to context-aware computing. We describe the advantages that a service infrastructure for context awareness has over other approaches, outline some of the core technical challenges that must be addressed before such an infrastructure can be built, and point out promising research directions for overcoming these challenges.