An architecture for context-aware applications

Abstract

The recent convergence of ubiquitous computing and context-aware computing has seen a considerable rise in interest in applications that exploit aspects of the contextual environment to offer services, present information, tailor application behavior or trigger adaptation. However, as a result of the lack of generic mechanisms for supporting context-awareness, context-aware applications remain very difficult to build and developers must deal with a wide range of issues related to representing, sensing, aggregating, storing, querying and reasoning of context. In order to remedy this situation, there is a need for better understanding of the design process associated with context-aware applications, architectural support for the entire context processing flow, and improved programming abstractions that ease the prototyping of applications.This research in context-aware computing has focused on the architectural support for context-aware application development. This dissertation presents a set of requirements for context-aware applications, based on which we introduced and implemented our architectural support, including an ontology-based context model, a context-aware architecture (namely Semantic Space) and a set of programming abstractions. This architectural support along with an identified design process makes it easier to build sensor wrappers that provide context and context-aware applications that use context. The case study, SituAwarePhone, validates our work, and illustrates, in concrete form, the process and issues involved in the design of context-aware software.