Abstract
Context-aware mobile applications are becoming popular, as a consequence of the technological advances in mobile devices, sensors and wireless networking. Nevertheless, developing a context-aware system involves several challenges. For example, what will be the contextual information, how to represent, acquire and process this information and how it will be used by the system. Some frameworks and middleware have been proposed in the literature to help programmers to overcome these challenges. Most of the proposed solutions, however, neither have an extensible ontology-based context model nor uses a communication method that allows a better use of the potentialities of the models of this kind.
TopGeneral Concepts
In this section we will show the main general concepts for better understanding the chapter.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Logical Sensor: Sensor capable of capturing context data from a combination of various other sensors and additional information from databases or other source.
Infrastructure for Context-Aware Mobile Applications: Set of applications and techniques used to assist in the development of context-aware applications.
Physical Sensor: Hardware sensor capable of capturing physical data.
Ontology-Based Context Model: Context model that was modeled and described using ontologies.
Context-Aware Mobile Application: Mobile application that use contextual information to provide a customized service.
Context: Information about the physical, technological and physiologic environment where an entity is performing and activity.
Virtual Sensor: Sensor capable of capturing context data from software applications or services.
Context Acquisition: Capture of context provided by sensors.
Context Model: Definition of the entities and their relationships in context-aware systems.
Context-Aware Application: Application that use contextual information to provide a customized service.
Context Modeling: Process of specifying the context model to be adopted by the system.
Contextual Rules: Rules that govern the behavior of the system according to a contextual status.
Contextual Status: Set of all contextual information of an entity in a given instant.