Towards a domain‐specific context acquisition, presentation and rule‐based control platform

Abstract

PurposeResearch on context‐aware systems design has received significant attention lately. One of the research directions on context‐aware systems is towards context‐aware frameworks adapted to domain‐specific requirements, aiming to improve their applicability in a variety of applications, which share common requirements. The purpose of this paper is to present the design of a domain‐specific context‐aware platform supporting context acquisition, presentation and rule‐based control.Design/methodology/approachThe proposed platform uses a formal context model, based on ontologies description, aiming to provide a common representation of contextual information, facilitating thus integration and reusability in application domains, which embrace a common set of requirements. A context‐aware system has been built upon a well defined data model, which inherits a list of offered functionalities and/or services at the acquisition, presentation and reasoning level. The presented platform entails an event‐driven context‐based inference mechanism aiming to enable automated reasoning.FindingsThe proposed platform has been applied in two different case studies, aiming to provide a proof of concept towards the applicability of the proposed framework in different application areas through the offered integration and adaptation mechanisms. Evaluation results, in the frame of these case studies, show the ease of using the platform and its acceptable performance in practice.Originality/valueAs context‐aware applications within specific domains share common requirements, it becomes mandatory to offer solutions, like the proposed in this paper, which can be easily adapted to application semantics and can be reused with different levels of abstractions in order to meet specific requirements. The present paper proposes a domain‐specific platform, which applies on a variety of application types with a common set of requirements.