Towards a Generic Contextual Elements Model to Support Context Management

Abstract. Context management solutions propose the separation of context manipulation tasks from the applications business features. An important concern when managing contextual elements is how to structure and represent them. Context models in literature, generally, propose the formalization of specific contextual elements related to a domain and/or application. However, to be effective and reused by different systems, a context manager should abstract away domain or application particularities. In this paper, we propose COM (Context-Oriented Model), an approach to deal with the context modelling problem through the separation of generic context concepts from domain/application particular concepts. COM is a top-down modelling approach that can be used as the base context model to generic context managers. We believe that this approach can also serve to support developers of context sensitive systems in modelling the context usage into their applications.