Mobile and Context-Aware GeoBI Applications: A Multilevel Model for Structuring and Sharing of Contextual Information

Abstract

With the requirements for high performance results in the today’s mobile, global, highly competitive, and technology-based business world, business professionals have to get supported by convenient mobile decision support systems (DSS). To give an improved support to mobile business professionals, it is necessary to go further than just allowing a simple remote access to a Business Intelligence platform. In this paper, the need for actual context-aware mobile Geospatial Business Intelligence (GeoBI) systems that can help capture, filter, organize and structure the user mobile context is exposed and justified. Furthermore, since capturing, structuring, and modeling mobile contextual information is still a research issue, a wide inventory of existing research work on context and mobile context is provided. Then, step by step, we methodologically identify relevant contextual information to capture for mobility purposes as well as for BI needs, organize them into context-dimensions, and build a hierarchical mobile GeoBI context model which (1) is geo-spatial-extended, (2) fits with human perception of mobility, (3) takes into account the local context interactions and information-sharing with remote contexts, and (4) matches with the usual hierarchical aggregated structure of BI data.