A Programmable Context Interface to Build a Context Infrastructure for Worldwide Smart Applications

摘要

Context-awareness is one of the most important technologies for the ubiquitous computing. To embed such a technology into applications, first of all, a well-defined architectural framework is required to support applications to obtain necessary contexts. Several studies have been proposed, but most of them overlooked one fundamental feature that contexts are subjective things and context-awareness is subjective behavior. Thus, providing pre-defined, preprogrammed operators which generate contexts by combining a couple of sensed data is very impractical. Instead, in this paper, we provide a well-defined programmable interface to applications, so that they can obtain and use contexts according to their own ideas. To evaluate our architecture and context interface, we implement all components comprising of the context infrastructure and perform several experiments. The results show the proposed method provides a flexible and expressive interface, but does not countervail the performance.