Theme issue on context-aware middleware and applications

Abstract

Context-aware computing is a central theme of ubiquitous computing. In order to facilitate the development and proliferation of context-aware applications in ubiquitous environment, a context-aware middleware is indispensable. Although many middleware systems have been presented in recent years, context-aware applications are still not very widely deployed in our real-life settings. Several key issues are not properly addressed, such as low cost (light-weight), QoS, spontaneous access, prototype verification and testing, balancing autonomy and user control, safety and privacy, scalability, etc. Context-aware middleware and applications require further scientific research for extending the current capabilities to be more effective and applicable in the real world. Submissions to this special issue come from an open call for papers as well as from selected papers presented at the 6th International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (UIC-09) held at Brisbane, Australia, 7–9 July 2009. We received a total of 22 submissions of which six papers were accepted after three rounds of rigorous reviews. A large number of reviewers assisted us in the review process. In order to ensure high reviewing standards, three to four reviewers evaluated each paper. The six selected papers just fall into the two main topics equally, three are about context-aware middleware, and the other three are about context-aware applications. In the opening paper of this special issue, ‘‘Towards a cooperative programming framework for context-aware applications’’, Bin Guo, Daqing Zhang, and Michita Imai propose an ontology-based programming framework for rapid prototyping, sharing, and personalization of contextaware applications, called OPEN. The framework provides different programming support for users with diverse technical skills. According to the programming requirements of different users, several cooperation patterns are identified, and the mechanisms to facilitate resource sharing and reuse are built into the framework. Three corresponding programming modes are elaborated by showing how a context-aware game is developed step-by-step with the support of the OPEN framework. The second paper, ‘‘Mobility management in ubiquitous environments’’, authored by Chiung-Ying Wang, HsiaoYun Huang, and Ren-Hung Hwang, addresses the problem of managing mobility in context-aware services. It first introduces an open framework, namely Ubiquitous Gate (U-gate) that includes a distributed context management architecture and a communication model based on standard protocols. A context-aware path planning mechanism (UbiPaPaGo), and a context-aware handoff mechanism (UbiHandoff), is proposed to achieve complete mobility management. Based on the path planning results of UbiPaPaGo, UbiHandoff derives a minimum Access Point Z. Yu (&) School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China e-mail: zhiwenyu@nwpu.edu.cn