Modeling and Using Context 6th International and Interdisciplina
Context a?ects a wide range of activities in humans and animals as well as in arti?cialagentsandothersystems.Theimportanceofcontextiswidelyackno- edged, and “context” has become an area of study in its own right, as evidenced bynumerousworkshops,symposia,
- PDF / 975,112 Bytes
- 14 Pages / 430 x 660 pts Page_size
- 103 Downloads / 174 Views
Abstract. Context-aware systems offer entirely new opportunities for application developers and for end users by gathering context information and adapting systems behavior accordingly. Several context models have been defined and various context-aware middleware has been developed in order to simplify the development of context-aware applications. Unfortunately, the development of an application by using these middleware products introduces several technical details in the application. These technical details are specific to a given middleware and reduce the possibility of reusing the application on other middleware. In this paper, we propose an MDD (Model Driven Development) approach that makes it possible to design context-aware applications independently of the platform. This approach is based on several phases that approach step by step the context platform and allow designers to automatically map their models to several platforms through the definition of automatic and modular transformations. To be able to apply this approach we define a new UML profile for context-aware applications, that we use to explore our approach.
1
Introduction
Model Driven Development (MDD) is an approach to developing software that proposes using machine-readable models at various levels of abstraction as its main artifacts. The key idea is to automatically transform highly abstract models into more concrete models from which an implementation can be generated in a straightforward way. The MDD approach is supported by the MDA (Model Driven Architecture) initiative of the OMG (Object Management Group), which introduced the notion of PIM (Platform Independent Model) and PSM (Platform Specific Model). A PIM is a model of a system that contains no technical details while a PSM is a representation of the same system containing all technical details that are needed to realize it on a concrete technology platform. The mapping between PIM and PSM is realized using an automatic transformation. This way, PSMs can be generated for different technology platforms. Platform specific knowledge is moved to the transformations, effectively separating those concerns from the main application. Context-aware applications can collect context information and quickly adapt their behavior to context changes. Context is any information that can be used B. Kokinov et al. (Eds.): CONTEXT 2007, LNAI 4635, pp. 15–28, 2007. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007
16
D. Ayed, D. Delanote, and Y. Berbers
to characterize the situation of entities that are considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and the application themselves. Context is typically the location, preference and state of people and computational and physical objects. Design and development of context-aware applications is particularly complex. First, Context acquisition is not an easy process. Context information, which can be acquired from heterogeneous and distributed sources (sensors, files, applications), may be dynamic and may require an additio
Data Loading...
