Context-Aware Applications for the Web: A Model-Driven Development Approach

Abstract

Adaptivity (the runtime adaptation to user profile data) and context-awareness (the runtime adaptation to generic context data) have been gaining momentum in the field of Web engineering over the last years, especially in response to the ever growing demand for highly personalized services and applications coming from end users. Developing context-aware and adaptive Web applications requires addressing a few design concerns that are proper of such kind of applications and independent of the chosen modeling paradigm or programming language. In this chapter we characterize the design of context-aware Web applications, the authors describe a conceptual, model-driven development approach, and they show how the peculiarities of context-awareness require augmenting the expressive power of conceptual models in order to be able to express adaptive application behaviors.