A transformation-based approach to context-aware modelling

Abstract

Context-aware computing is a paradigm for governing the numerous mobile devices surrounding us. In this computing paradigm, software applications continuously and dynamically adapt to different "contexts" implying different software configurations of such devices. Unfortunately, modeling a context-aware application for all possible contexts is only feasible in the simplest of cases. Hence, tool support verifying certain properties is required. In this article, we introduce the Context-Aware Application model (CAA), in which context adaptations are specified explicitly as model transformations. By mapping this model to graphs and graph transformations, we can exploit graph transformation techniques such as critical pair analysis to find contexts for which the resulting application model is ambiguous. We validate our approach by means of an example of a mobile city guide, demonstrating that we can identify subtle context interactions that might go unnoticed otherwise.

CASSIS: A Modeling Language for Customizable User Interface Designs

“…The largest model had over 100 model elements (excluding the Canonical Abstract Prototypes library used to create the model). It was successfully used to discuss the structure and behavior of a context-aware mobile application, targeting professional caregivers for people with dementia, with academic and industrial partners in an applied research project 3 . The people involved in the discussion included 4 persons with a software development and software engineering background, a cognitive scientist and a designer.…”

“…We use the mobile city guide presented by Degrandsart et al [3] as a specification exemplar of a context-aware application. We present only the parts of the exemplar relevant for discussing the features of CASSIS.…”

Towards access control for collaborative modelling apps

“…While this is not to be considered a full-fledged contextual modelling language for model adaptation (since this would correspond to the context metamodel in Fig. 2), some works can be found on modelling context adaptation for mobile or web applications [8,9,21,26]. We will take inspiration for those works to develop our DSL to specify contextual rules for model adaptation.…”