The Context Modelling Toolkit

Abstract

Context awareness plays an important role in recent smart environments and embedded interactions. In order to increase user satisfaction and acceptance, these context-aware solutions should be controllable by end users. Over the last few years we have therefore seen an emerging trend towards visual programming tools for context-aware applications based on simple "IF this THEN that" rules. However, existing solutions often do not support the simple reuse of the "this" part in order to define more sophisticated rules. Given that the desired level of control varies among individuals, we propose a unified multi-layered context modelling approach distinguishing between end users, expert users and programmers. Our Context Modelling Toolkit (CMT) consists of the necessary context modelling concepts and offers a rule-based context processing engine. We further illustrate how end users and expert users might interact with the CMT framework. Finally, we highlight some advantages of our Context Modelling Toolkit by discussing a number of use cases.

A Middleware for Implicit Human-Computer Interaction Across IoT Platforms

“…Therefore, tackling this issue is vital to improve the user experience in IoT interactions. Corno et al [1] introduced a high-level semantic model for IoT rules but as we demonstrated in Section 1, it lacks support for richer rule definitions such as the concept of situations introduced by Trullemans et al [8], which might improve cross-platform interoperability.…”

“…In order to meet the user's requirement of having exclusive ownership and administrative rights of their rules, we propose that the middleware component then translates their rule to a high-level format such as EUPont [1]. We plan to introduce the missing concepts we identified in this high-level format, including the situations proposed in [8] as well as regaining the possibility of specifying environments and/or devices where certain user-defined rules should be executed. It is assumed that the middleware component has been granted write access to the user's Solid pod such that it is able to store the translated rules (3).…”

“…We posit that users should have the flexibility to use any tool of their choice and they should not have to switch to a completely new solution in order to author their IoT rules. We also note that the functionality exposed by task automation or IoT platforms, such as the one proposed by Corno et al, are often quite simple and prevent users from creating richer reusable situations [8]. For example, in state-of-the-art platforms the If side of a rule such as "If my heart rate is higher than 100 bpm, then change the colour of the smart light in my living room to red" will have to be re-defined each time the user wants to perform an action based on their heart rate value.…”

“…For example, in state-of-the-art platforms the If side of a rule such as "If my heart rate is higher than 100 bpm, then change the colour of the smart light in my living room to red" will have to be re-defined each time the user wants to perform an action based on their heart rate value. With the solution proposed by Trullemans et al [8], the If side can also lead to the definition of a reusable situation rather than simply triggering an action. For example, the condition "If my heart rate is higher than 100 bpm" might lead to the situation "My heart rate is high".…”