Um processo de software e um modelo ontológico para apoio ao desenvolvimento de aplicações sensíveis a contexto

Abstract

In order to provide adaptive services according to users’ tasks, context-aware applications exploit context information, which is any information used to characterize entities of a user-computer interaction such as user identity or user location. This thesis deals with the lack of a software process-based approach to supporting the inherent complexity of developing context-aware systems. The work reported in this thesis followed three main lines of investigation: context information modeling, services for processing context information, and a software process for context-aware computing. The contributions of this thesis include: (i) the Process for Ontological Context-aware Applications (POCAp) to support the development of context-aware applications based on ontologies; (ii) the Semantic Context Model (SeCoM ) based on Semantic Web standards and ontologies; (iii) the Semantic Context Kernel (SCK) services infrastructure for interpreting ontological context information models such as the SeCoM model; (iv) an implementation of the POCAp process for the extension of an application with context information based on the SeCoM model, and its integration with services of the SCK infrastructure; and (v) the identification of design issues related to the inference over ontology-based context information.