Mobile Intelligence

13.3 RELATED WORK

Several related works have noticed the importance of seeking a foundation of context-aware computing [22]. Roman et al. presented a formal treatment of context awareness via extending the mobile UNITY with context handling part into context UNITY [23]. The context UNITY formalism is similar to our context-aware action systems formalism, but approaching from an agent-like view in modeling context awareness and context dependency.

Henricksen et al. showed a conceptual framework and software infrastructure that together address known software engineering challenges in context-aware computing applications [24]. The context model is built on semantic level with the CML language [25], which can be categorized as an extension of the object-role modeling in software engineering process.

UML approach to context models was presented by Hinze et al., where UML diagrams are combined with discrete event systems to facilitate the development of mobile context-aware systems [26]. Due to the limitation of UML, which lacks a rigorous mathematic foundation, this approach can be deemed as a semiformal. The similar UML-like approach can be found elsewhere [27], where a simulation-based paradigm was presented. Besides general aspect of context, fragment aspects of context, such as ontology [28], rational [29], middleware [30], and trust [31], were also considered.