Model-driven development of pervasive applications using context and ontologies: an m-commerce case study

The widespread use of handheld devices significantly motivates the growth of mobile commerce (m-commerce) that enables end-users to access, buy and sell goods and services whilst on the move. The pervasive nature of m-commerce applications renders context-awareness as an essential characteristic that enhances their ability to flexibly adapt to changing conditions and dynamic environments. Using ontologies to model context information and reason about context at a semantic level has attracted a lot of attention in the research community. However, developing m-commerce applications in a fast and effective way is in itself a very challenging task, due to the complexity introduced by the multiplicity of devices and heterogeneity of platforms and implementation technologies. Augmenting this development process with the adoption of ontologies introduces additional burden by the further work required for ontology specification and management. This paper studies the use of OMG's Model Driven Architecture in the development process of pervasive services with intent on reducing this burden. It presents a Context Ontology Model (COM) and a Model Driven Integration Architecture (MDIA) for ontology-based context information modelling and Context-Aware Application (CAA) development. It also introduces a model transformation mechanism for the generation of the CAA logic. Finally, a case study is presented, focusing on the development of a context-aware m-commerce tourist application that demonstrates in detail how the proposed approach works in practice