Context Model and Universal APIs

Register in this topic
  • Contact
    • José Manuel Cantera (Telefonica) –
    • Nikolaos Tsouroulas (Telefonica) -
  • Overview
    • This is an invitation to contribute with a Model and Universal APIs to the NEXOF-RA framework for context-awareness in service front-ends.
  • Problem Statement

    • The main challenge introduced by context-awareness is to come up with a flexible and unambiguous representation of the Context - a Context Model. Using this Context Model, applications will be able to adapt seamlessly to the target environment. Nonetheless, the heterogeneous nature of context-aware applications makes it impossible to have a universal, unique representation of the Context. A good compromise can be achieved if context models are able to manage a set of universal properties, useful for any application, in conjunction with application-specific custom properties.

      Once a Context Model has been defined, the next critical step will be the adoption of a Universal API that supports such Context Model. Such API should be platform and language independent, shielding developers from the mechanisms used to gather distributed context information.
  • Scope

    • The following context aspects are under the scope of this invitation to contribute:

      • User Profile: global preferences, interests, skills and social network
      • Delivery Context: device, network, user agent and local settings (font size, volume, brightness …)
      • Environment: location and moment in time

      The adopted Context Model must be extensible allowing other properties and aspects (standard or application-specific) to be included in the future.
      The Universal API adopted must support the Context Model and in addition it should have the following functionalities:

      • Platform independent
      • Generic and extensible, allowing to work with different vocabularies of contextual properties
      • It should support the notion of properties, aspects and components of the Context.
      It should provide not only query-response functions but also publish and subscribe mechanisms for notifying contextual changes to applications
  • Contributions

    • At an initial stage we invite contributions to the following work items:

      • An standardised model for representing the fundamental aspects of the Context that are under scope
      • A Universal Context API that meets at least the requirements under scope
      These building blocks are considered the most urgent to be adopted, as they enable the minimal infrastructure for context-awareness. There are remaining building blocks that will be the subject of future invitations to contribute. Such invitations will be based on a roadmap that might also be part of the outcome of this process.
  • Baseline

    • The W3C’s Delivery Context Ontology might be an starting point for an standard, minimal and universally-accepted Context Model. Such specification could be generalized and extended with additional modules capable of representing new general-purpose entities.

      The DDR Simple API and DCCI are two W3C emerging standards for dealing with contextual information, thus they should be considered with regards to the Universal Context API.
  • Further Information