1. Foundations for a Platform to Develop ContextAware Systems by Domain Experts
David Martin, Diego Lopez, Carlos Lamsfus, Aurkene
Alzua
Cooperative Research Centre in Tourism – CICtourGUNE (Spain)
david.martin@tourgune.org

2. • Outline
• Motivation
• Context
• Situation
• Context Cloud
• Conclusions

3. • Outline
• Motivation
• Context
• Situation
• Context Cloud
• Conclusions

4. Motivation
• Ubiquitous Computing
(Weiser, 1991)

5. Motivation
• Ubiquitous Computing: 2012
How can we personalize and adapt these systems
to people’s needs in Ubicomp environments?

6. Motivation
• Ubiquitous Computing: 2012
CONTEXT!!

7. Motivation
• The development of context-aware systems is difficult
• Technical challenges
• Context data has to be…
• Obtained (distributed, heterogeneous)
• Processed (data model)
• Managed (inference->situations)
• The system has to be adapted to the identified situation
• Definition of situations
• Which are the relevant situations?
• Where is the needed context information?
• Which are the desired behaviors of the system?
Dependent on the application domain
Manufacturing
Tourism
Automotive Industry …

8. Motivation
• We need…
• The collaboration among Domain Experts and
Programmers in the development process. They can
better identify the situations of users that can be relevant
for the system to be developed.
• Toolkits that can make easier the development of
Context-Aware Systems, even for people that do not
have programming skills

9. • Outline
• Motivation
• Context
• Situation
• Context Cloud
• Conclusions

10. Context is…
… “any information that can be obtained and
processed by a hardware or a software system, in
order to identify the situation of an entity and
adapt the system’s behaviour to that situation”.

11. Context
Entities
Living being
Place
Object
Situations
Sleeping
Pollution
At home
Raining
Software
Driving a car
Cooking
Hardware
Information
Weather
Date
Time
Speed
Location
QR Code

12. • Outline
• Motivation
• Context
• Situation
• Context Cloud
• Conclusions

13. A situation…
… is the state of a subset of the available context
information at a certain region in space and at a
concrete interval in time, identified by a name

14. Situation is…
Waiting for
the bus
Bus stop
Going out on
a rainy day
Hotel room

15. • Outline
• Motivation
• Context
• Situation
• Context Cloud
• Conclusions

16. Context Cloud
End user
CONTEXT-AWARE
SYSTEM
Waiting for
the bus
Going out on
a rainy day
Programmer
Warm place
Programmer
CONTEXT CLOUD
Domain expert
Bus stop
Hotel room
Beach

17. Context Cloud
• A web platform for the collaborative development of
Context-Aware Systems
Programmer
Domain expert
• Technical overview of the system
• Implementation of the final service using
the generated outputs to adapt the
behavior of the system
• Knowledge about the application domain
• Situations

18. Context Cloud: functionalities
End user
CONTEXT-AWARE
SYSTEM
Programmer
Walking
Working
Sleeping
Hotel
CONTEXT CLOUD
Programmer
Bus stop
Active
Provider
Passive
Provider
Providers
Domain expert
Rule1
GET
Rule 2
XML
POST
Programmer
Weather service
Smartphone

19. • Outline
• Motivation
• Context
• Situation
• Context Cloud
• Conclusions

20. Conclusions
• A Platform to Develop Context-Aware
Systems
• Improvements over existing approaches
• Free data model
• Support for mobility (GIS)
• Extensible (rules, data model, sources,…)
• Web development environment (involvement of
DE)

21. Context data model
Rules

22. Conclusions
• Evaluation of the platform
• Carried out in pairs composed by a Domain
Expert and a Programmer
• The participants (12) were given a document
where four different situations were described.
• The 83% find that learning how to use the platform is
easy.
• The 83% find that the interaction with the platform is
clear.
• The 83% of the participants state that it would be easy
for them to become skillful at using the platform.
• The 100% state that using the platform in their jobs
would enable them to develop context-aware systems
more quickly and that it would make it easier to
develop context-aware systems.

23. Thank You!!
davidmartin@tourgune.org
http://vimeo.com/contextcloud
www.tourgune.org