Data, Context, Situation: On the Usefulness of Semantic Layers for Designing Context-Aware Systems

Abstract

Abstract. Context-aware applications adapt their behavior according to the current situation of their user or their (often physical) environment. This adaptation could be the change of the user interface, the performance of actions (like sending messages or triggering actuators), or the change of used resources (like network bandwidth or processing power). To determine relevant situations, many heterogeneous data sources could be used, ranging from sensor data over mined patterns in files to explicit user input. Since most sensors are not perfect, context quality has to be considered. And since many context-aware applications are mobile, the set of data sources might change during runtime. All this issues make context management and reasoning, and the development of correct adaptations within context-aware applications a challenging task. This paper is based on a keynote given at ICSOFT 2012 that introduces a layered model to separate different tasks and concerns in designing data models for context-aware applications. It shows how existing works map to this layered model, and how the model can help in designing context aware applications that are better to maintain and safer to use.