A generic approach for on-the-fly adding of context-aware features to existing websites

Abstract

More and more, mobile devices act as personal information managers and are able to obtain rich contextual information on the user's environment. Mobile, context-aware web applications can exploit this information to better address the needs of mobile users. Currently, such websites are either developed separately from their associated desktop-oriented version, or both versions are created simultaneously by employing methodologies that support multi-platform context-aware websites, requiring an extensive engineering effort. While these approaches provide a solution for developing new websites, they go past the plethora of existing websites. To address this issue, we present an approach for enhancing existing websites on-the-fly with context-aware features. We first discuss the requirements for such an adaptation process, and identify applicable adaptation methods to realize context-aware features. Next, we explain our generic approach, which is grounded in the use of semantic information extracted from existing websites. Finally, we present a concrete application of our approach that is based on the SCOUT framework for mobile and context-aware application development.