Providing context-aware adaptations based on a semantic model

Abstract

Smartphones and tablet PCs are on the verge of revolutionizing the information society by offering high quality applications and almost permanent connectivity to the Internet in a mobile world. They naturally support new applications that take advantage of context information like location, time and other environmental conditions. However, developing these novel context-aware applications is challenging as it is difficult to a priori anticipate their execution context and the adaptations that might be necessary to use new context information. This issue is reinforced by the semantic gap between the low-level technical realization of adaptation mechanisms and the demand to describe adaptations in abstract and comprehensible business terms. This paper presents programming support for context-aware adaptations based on a semantic model that builds on the AOCI framework. Using such a model, applications and adaptations can be described by means of easy to comprehend business terms. Thereby the model enables the AOCI framework to store and publish both context and domain-specific run-time information and provides a basis for high-level and tailored programming support. This enables to transparently select adaptations based on various criteria and integrate them into applications at run-time. At the level of adaptation mechanisms our approach supports integration for permanent changes using Aspect-Oriented Programming and more importantly for spontaneous and short-time integration of web services by means of interceptors. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.