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Towards a programming framework for activity-oriented context-aware applications

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Abstract

Context-aware system is an emerging research area in recent years. Context plays an important role in these systems. In most existing work, context is treated as all relative elements in the environment of an application, and the scope of context is predefined by the developers during the development. However, it is difficult to analyze, specify, and organize everything in the environment accurately and completely; and even when it is possible, the developed applications are difficult to extend or modify as the requests for environment may change over time. In this paper, we focus on activity-oriented context-aware (AOCA) applications where the requests for environment are highly dependent on user activities, and propose a programming framework for developing AOCA applications. In particular, we first present a concept model for describing the notions of activity-oriented context. Next, based on the concept model, we describe the details of the programming framework as well as a development tool. Moreover, we provide a platform to support the runtime of AOCA applications, and demonstrate the advantages of our programming framework through experimental evaluations.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the National Basic Research Program (973 program) (2015CB352202), the National High Technology Research and Development Program (863 program) (2015AA01A203), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 91318301, 61373011, 61321491).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210000, China

    Xuansong Li, Xianping Tao & Jian Lu

Authors
  1. Xuansong Li
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  2. Xianping Tao
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  3. Jian Lu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xianping Tao.

Additional information

Xuansong Li received his BS and PhD degrees in computer science from Nanjing University, China in 2007 and 2016, respectively. He is currently an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China. His research interests include software methodology, pervasive computing, and formal methods. He is a member of CCF.

Xianping Tao received his MS and PhD degrees in computer science from Nanjing University (NJU), China in 1994 and 2001, respectively. He is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science at NJU. His research interests include software agents, middleware systems, Internetware methodology, and pervasive computing. He is a member of CCF and IEEE.

Jian Lu received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in computer science from Nanjing University (NJU), China in 1982, 1984, and 1988, respectively. He is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science at NJU. He is also the director of the State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology and the vice director of the Institute of Software Technology at NJU. His research interests include programming methodology, pervasive computing, software agent, and middleware. He is a member of ACM and a fellow of CCF.

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Li, X., Tao, X. & Lu, J. Towards a programming framework for activity-oriented context-aware applications. Front. Comput. Sci. 11, 987–1006 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-016-5399-4

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