Decoupling context management and application logic: A new framework

Abstract

Several frameworks have already been proposed to simplify the development of context-aware applications. These frameworks are focused on collecting and publishing contextual data, and on providing common semantics, definitions and representations of these data. This implies that applications share the same semantics, which limits the range of use cases where a framework can be used since that assumption induces a strong coupling between context management and application logic. This article proposes a framework that decouples context management from application business logic. The aim is to reduce the overhead for applications that run on resource-limited devices while still providing efficient mechanisms to support context-awareness and behavior adaptation. This framework implements an innovative approach that involves third parties in the process of context processing definition by structuring it in atomic functions, and describing it with an XML-based programming language. Its implementation and evaluation demonstrates the benefits, in terms of flexibility, of using trusted design patterns from software engineering for developing context-aware application.