Mobile Context-Aware Applications for Ubiquitous Computing
J.UCS Special Issue
María D. Lozano
(University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain
maria.lozano@uclm.es)
Jose A. Gallud
(University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain
jose.gallud@ucml.es)
Philippe Palanque
(Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France
palanque@irit.fr)
Mobile devices are changing users technological habits since the
possibilities to be connected to Internet everywhere are increasing as
technology is surrounding all aspects of users life. A user with a
mobile device can find that its standard functionality can be extended
with those applications and services provided by the
environment. Moreover, the user can influence in the environment by
means of its interactions. An important requirement is that the mobile
device has to be able to interact with the context.
Recent advances in mobile technology are providing mobile users with
the capacity to interact with their surrounding world. Mobile systems
can be deployed in a wide range of physical environments. The context
awareness needed in these scenarios is much more than a question of
location or positioning. These systems have to address more
sophisticated techniques to adapt the systems behavior to the context
of the user.
This Special Issue tries to offer an innovative and original vision of
the now and future context-aware applications for ubiquitous
computing. A number of good quality papers were received and, after a
rigorous reviewing process, only eleven papers were selected for
publication. The next lines include a brief summary of each paper.
The paper by Ichiro Satoh presents an
agent-based system for building and operating agent-based
context-aware services in public spaces, including museums.
The paper by Young Bok
Kim proposes a real-time analysis scheme based on real-time estimation
of time-based usability and accessibility for human mobile-web
interactions with a name-based directory server for social networking
in the ubiquitous Internet environment and he includes an
implementation of a ubiquitous mobile-web directory service.
The paper authored by Alejandro Cadenas et
al., presents a global context processing architecture and a
proposal for a multi-level context management framework for smart
telecommunications services, whose objective is to optimise the
available processing resources of the presented architecture to
provide contextual monitoring to a high number of subscribers with
limited resources.
Kris McGlinn et al.
explore their experiences in the development of a Simulated Context
(SimCon) Model which currently supports taking information from a
Virtual Reality (VR) smart building and converting it into three types
of location context to conduct early rapid evaluation of location
based smart building applications.
The paper authored by Giussepe Ghiani and
Fabio Paternò presents a novel technique for supporting
device selection by providing dynamic graphical representations of the
users orientation and position in relation to the available target
devices in the current environment.
Marino Linaje et
al. present the combination of two different methodologies, WebML
and RUX-Method, both using MDD principles, to obtain multi-device
context-aware Rich Internet Applications using a Model-Driven
approach.
The paper by Praveen Madiraju
et al., proposes the architecture of a system named Mobile
Intelligent Interruptions Management (MIIM), created for the automated
administration of personal unavailability with regard to cell
phones.
Juan
M. López and Montserrat Sendín present a software
infrastructure to automatically adapt mobile systems according to
their context of use. This infrastructure provides a multi-sensor
support and is independent of the mobile technology used on the
device.
Jason J. Jung
proposes a novel mechanism for integrating online social networks,
which are regarded as an important channel for exchanging and
propagating contexts. To efficiently discover personal contexts of
certain users, the contexts of their neighbors can be used to provide
mobile recommendation services to mobile subscribers.
Ricardo
Tesoriero et al. present an MDA approach that defines three layers
of models to develop context-aware applications for ubiquitous
computing environments. The first layer captures the conceptual
characteristics of the application. The second layer defines the
software characteristics of the application. The third layer defines
the deployment environment of the system according to the views
generated by the second layer.
Youna
Jung and Minsoo Kim introduce community computing as a new
paradigm in which ubiquitous services are provided through
context-aware cooperation among existing agents. To design such
systems intuitively, they propose an abstraction model, called the
situation-aware community computing model which includes the community
situation model and the situation-aware cooperation model.
We would like to thank all reviewers for their time and effort and for
providing invaluable comments and suggestions to the
authors. Certainly, they have specially contributed to improve the
quality of this special issue. We also thank Hermann Maurer (Managing
Editor) and Dana Kaiser (Assistant Editor) of J.UCS, for their help
and for giving us the opportunity to edit this special issue. Finally,
we hope the reader will enjoy the contents of this special issue and
find it useful and informative.
María Lozano, Jose A. Gallud and Philippe Palanque
July 2010
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