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

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. © 2017, Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.