A Comprehensive Approach to Model and Use Context for Adapting Applications in Pervasive Environments

International audienceWith an increasing diversity of pervasive computing devices integrated in our surroundings and an increasing mobility of users, it will be important for computer systems and applications to be context-aware. Lots of works have already been done in this direction on how to capture context data and how to carry it to the application. Among the remaining challenges are to create the intelligence to analyze the context information and deduce the meaning out of it, and to integrate it into adaptable applications. Our work focuses on these challenges by defining generic context storage and processing model and by studying its impact on the application core. We propose a reusable context ontology model that is based on two levels: a generic level and a domain specific level. We propose an adaptation framework to guarantee adaptation of applications to the context in a pervasive computing environment. We also introduce a comprehensive adaptation approach that involves content adaptation and presentation adaptation inline with the adaptation of the core application. Our case study shows that the context model and application adaptation strategies provide promising service architecture