A Quality Framework for the Storage and Retrieval of Context

Abstract

Much current work in the field of context-aware systems focuses on application-specific solutions and ad-hoc approaches, and the lack of conceptual models for the design of context-aware systems hinders the development of more general and complex systems. Furthermore, it is often unclear what the consequences of early design decisions are for the quality of the final implementation, making the design difficult and leading to mistakes only to be discovered when the system is already implemented. In this article we present a classification of the architectural aspects of developing context-aware systems. We furthermore give a quality framework that describes the consequences of the architectural aspects on the quality of the context-aware system. We demonstrate the usefulness of the framework by modeling the architecture of a context-aware system.