Mobile phones enable us to carry out a wider range of tasks every day, and as a result they have become more ubiquitous than ever. However, they are still more limited in terms of processing power and interaction capabilities than traditional computers, and the often distracting and time-constricted scenarios in which we use them do not help in alleviating these limitations. Context-awareness is a valuable technique to address these issues, as it enables to adapt application behaviour to each situation. In this paper we present a context management infrastructure for mobile environments, aimed at controlling context information life-cycle in this kind of scenarios, with the main goal of enabling application and services to adapt their behaviour to better meet end-user needs. This infrastructure relies on semantic technologies and open standards to improve interoperability, and is based on a central element, the context manager. This element acts as a central context repository and takes most of the computational burden derived from dealing with this kind of information, thus relieving from these tasks to more resource-scarce devices in the system.
References
[1]
The World in 2013: ICT Facts and Figures. Available online: http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/facts/material/ICTFactsFigures2013.pdf (accessed on accessed 25 July 2013).
[2]
Gehlen, G.; Aijaz, F.; Sajjad, M.; Walke, B. A Mobile Context Dissemination Middleware. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Information Technology, Las Vegas, NV, USA, 2–4 April 2007; pp. 155–160.
[3]
Dey, A.K. Understanding and using context. Pers. Ubiquit. Comput. 2001, 5, 4–7.
[4]
Gu, T.; Pung, H.K.; Zhang, D.Q. A Middleware for Building Context-Aware Mobile Services. Proceedings of IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference VTC, Milan, Italy, 17–19 May 2004; pp. 2656–2660.
[5]
Hayes-Roth, B. A blackboard architecture for control. Arti. Intell. 1985, 26, 251–321.
[6]
Satyanarayanan, M. Mobile computing: The next decade. ACM SIGMOBILE Mob. Comput. Commun. Rev. 2011, 15, 2–10.
[7]
Salber, D.; Dey, A.; Abowd, G. The Context Toolkit: Aiding the Development of Context-Enabled Applications. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: The CHI is the Limit, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, 15–20 May 1999; pp. 434–441.
[8]
Coppola, P.; Della Mea, V.; Di Gaspero, L.; Mizzaro, S.; Scagnetto, I.; Selva, A.; Vassena, L.; Riziò, P. MoBe: Context-aware Mobile Applications on Mobile Devices for Mobile Users. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Exploiting Context Histories in Smart Environments, Munich, Germany, 8–13 May 2005.
[9]
Van Woensel, W.; Casteleyn, S.; de Troyer, O. A framework for decentralized, context-aware mobile applications using semantic web technology. Lect. Note. Comput. Sci. 2009, 5872, 88–97.
[10]
Hu, D.H.; Dong, F.; Wang, C.L. A Semantic Context Management Framework on Mobile Device. Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Embedded Software and Systems, Zhejiang, China, 25–27 May 2009; pp. 331–338.
[11]
Cassagnes, C.; Roose, P.; Dalmau, M. KALIMUCHO: Software architecture for limited mobile devices. ACM SIGBED Rev. 2009, 6, 1–6.
[12]
Iglesias Alvarez, J.; Bernardos Barbolla, A.M.; Alvarez, A.; Sacristan, M. A Light Reasoning Infrastructure to Enable Context Aware Mobile Applications. Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing, Hong Kong, 11–13 December 2010; pp. 386–391.
[13]
David, L.; Endler, M.; Barbosa, S.D.J.; Filho, J.V. Middleware Support for Context-aware Mobile Applications with Adaptive Multimodal User Interfaces. Proceedings of the 2011 Fourth International Conference on Ubi-Media Computing, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 3–4 July 2011; pp. 106–111.
[14]
Benítez-Guerrero, E.; Mezura-Godoy, C. Montané-Jiménez, L.G. Context-aware mobile collaborative systems: Conceptual modeling and case study. Sensors 2012, 12, 13491–13507.
[15]
Strang, T.; Linnhoff-Popien, C. A Context Modeling Survey. Proceedings of the Workshop on Advanced Context Modelling, Reasoning and Management, UbiComp 2004–The Sixth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Nottingham, England, 7–10 September 2004.
[16]
RDF—Semantic Web Standards. Available online: http://www.w3.org/RDF/ (accessed on 19 March 2013).
[17]
SPARQL Query Language for RDF. Available online: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/ (accessed on 19 March 2013).
[18]
The Open Services Gateway Initiative. Available online: http://www.osgi.org/ (accessed on 21 February 2013).
[19]
Apache Jena. Available online: http://jena.apache.org/ (accessed on 21 February 2013).
[20]
Jenabean: A Library for Persisting Java Beans to RDF. Available online: http://code.google.com/p/jenabean/ (accessed on 21 February 2013).
[21]
Richardson, L.; Ruby, S. RESTful Web Services; O'Reilly Media: Sebastopol, CA, 2007.
[22]
Using JConsole: Java SE Monitoring and Management Guide. Available online: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/management/jconso%le.html (accessed on 24 July 2013).
