foundations for a platform to develop context-aware systems by domain experts

Foundations for a Platform to Develop Context-

Aware Systems by Domain Experts

David Martin, Diego Lopez, Carlos Lamsfus, Aurkene

Alzua

Cooperative Research Centre in Tourism – CICtourGUNE (Spain)

david.martin@tourgune.org

•Outline

•Motivation

•Context

•Situation

•Context Cloud

•Conclusions

•Outline

•Motivation

•Context

•Situation

•Context Cloud

•Conclusions

Motivation

• Ubiquitous Computing

(Weiser, 1991)

Motivation

• Ubiquitous Computing: 2012

How can we personalize and adapt these systems

to people’s needs in Ubicomp environments?

Motivation

• Ubiquitous Computing: 2012

CONTEXT!!

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 …

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

•Outline

•Motivation

•Context

•Situation

•Context Cloud

•Conclusions

… “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”.

Context is…

Context

Living being Place Object

Entities

Software Hardware

Sleeping

At home Raining

Pollution

Cooking

Situations

Driving a car

Weather Time Location Date Speed

Information

QR Code

•Outline

•Motivation

•Context

•Situation

•Context Cloud

•Conclusions

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

Situation is…

Going out on

a rainy day

Bus stop Hotel room

Waiting for

the bus

•Outline

•Motivation

•Context

•Situation

•Context Cloud

•Conclusions

Context Cloud

Waiting for

the bus

Going out on

a rainy day Warm place

CONTEXT CLOUD

Bus stop Hotel room Beach

Domain expert

Programmer

Programmer

CONTEXT-AWARE

SYSTEM

End user

Context Cloud

• A web platform for the collaborative development of

Context-Aware Systems

Domain expert

Programmer

• 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

Context Cloud: functionalities

CONTEXT CLOUD

Domain expert

Programmer

Active

Provider

Passive

Provider Rule1 Rule 2

Hotel

Working

Sleeping

Walking

Providers

GET

POST

Weather service Smartphone

Programmer

XML

Bus stop

CONTEXT-AWARE

SYSTEM Programmer

End user

•Outline

•Motivation

•Context

•Situation

•Context Cloud

•Conclusions

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)

Context data model

Rules

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.

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

www.tourgune.org