UML based Model of a Context Aware System

UML based Model of a Context Aware System

Umar Mahmud
DOI: 10.4018/IJAPUC.2015010101
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Abstract

Context Awareness is the mechanism through which systems can adapt to the needs of a user by monitoring the context. Context includes environment, spatial, temporal, etc information that is used to infer the current activity. UML is used to design a context aware system. The context aware system is viewed as an Object Oriented software product. The UML model is generated through ArgoUML, a free UML modelling tool. The Use Case Diagram, the Sequence Diagrams and the Class Diagram are modelled using this tool. The Class Diagram is subjected to CK metrics to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the design. The measurements show that the proposed model is within the recommended range.
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1. Introduction

Context awareness is the ability of a system to be aware of its surroundings and recognize the activity. This encompasses the applications, services, devices, sensors and human users bounded within an environment (Schilit, Hilbert, & Trevor, 2002), (Mokhtar, Foumier, Georgantes, & Issamy, 2006). The information gathered from these participants is collecfively called as ‘Context’ (Mokhtar, Foumier, Georgantes, & Issamy, 2006). The context is then used to identify the activity using learrning mechanisms (Mahmud & Javed, Context Inference Engine (CiE): Inferring Context, 2012), (Malik, Mahmud, & Javed, 2007), (Mahmud & Javed, Context Inference Engine (CiE): Classifying Activity Of Context Using Minkowski Distance And Standard Deviation Based Ranks, 2014).Context awareness is the ability of systems to identify the users context and deliver better services based on their needs (Mahmud, Iltaf, Rehman, & Kamran, 2007), (Knappmeyer, Kiani, Reetz, Baker, & Tonjes, 2013). Since Weiser’s vision, context aware computing has evolved from context aware applications to platforms that classify current activity based on the context (Strang & Linnhoff-Popien, 2004), (Weiser, 1991).

Unified Modelling Language (UML) is a software design mechanism to model Object Oriented software systems as an agile technique. The UML is a rich visual paradigm that is easily converted to object oriented code in Java, C#, VB, etc (Object Management Group, 2014), (Miles & Hamilton, 2006), (Page-Jones, 2000). UML is widely used and provided different diagrams to represent the different stages of software development. This includes Use cases, Sequence diagrams, Class diagrams, Deployment diagrams, Activity diagrams, etc (Ambler, 2001).

The participants of a context aware system can be organized as the user and the services. The user includes the interaction and smart devices owned by him (Mahmud, Farooq, Javed, & Malik, 2012), (Mahmud, Iltaf, & Kamran, Context Congregator: Gathering Contextual Information in CAPP, 2007). The contextual data once gathered is then classified to ascertain the activity of the context. The classification can be a rule based, ontology based or may employ leaning mechanism (Mahmud, Iltaf, Rehman, & Kamran, 2007), (Malik, Mahmud, & Javed, 2007). This activity information is then shared with the applications so that they may be adjusted and tuned according to the activity e.g., alarms may be triggered based on the health state of a patient (Kuo, Lee, & Chung, 2010). Thus, context aware systems integrate the numerous small and inexpensive devices to provide better services to the users.

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