CaaSSET: A Framework for Model-Driven Development of Context as a Service

Abstract

Developing a stand-alone context-aware application is costly and time-consuming due to the diversity and complexity of the requirements. Context-as-a-Service (CaaS) seeks to overcome the issues by following the idea of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The CaaS delivery model attempts to separate context service consumers from context service providers. However, CaaS shifts the complexities of context service provisioning and management from consumers toward providers. Considering the merits of Model-Driven Development (MDD) in coping with the complexities of problems in different domains, we leverage MDD in the CaaS domain and propose the CaaSSET framework to ease the development of context services. A prerequisite for realizing this aim is to specify the CaaS domain as a meta-model. Our CaaSSET framework consists of a CaaS reference model, a context service meta-model, a graphical modeling tool, a code generation tool, and a context service management tool. Using CaaSSET, the context services are modeled in a graphical environment and transformed into executable context web services (semi-) automatically. To evaluate the applicability of the CaaSSET framework, we have modeled and developed a tourism context service as a case study. We have also compared the framework with the related work based on 44 evaluation criteria, which we have extracted from 14 context service requirements.