Ningning Cheng, Shaxun Chen, Xianping Tao, Jian Lu and Guihai Chen
Context correctness and fault handling are very important to the quality of service in context‐aware applications. However, they are often ignored by researchers and application…
Abstract
Purpose
Context correctness and fault handling are very important to the quality of service in context‐aware applications. However, they are often ignored by researchers and application developers. This paper aims to present a model for context‐aware applications.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper proposes a transaction model for context‐aware applications, in order to provide a uniform infrastructure for service quality management.
Findings
The paper finds that, in this model, context‐aware applications are organized as a number of logic units and each unit may have a compensation module, which will be executed when errors or exceptions occur during the execution of those applications in order to minimize the bad infection. This model supports nested scopes and the number of levels of subtransactions is unlimited.
Practical implications
The paper also presents an implementation of this transaction model, which is specialized for context‐aware use.
Originality/value
This paper utilized a novel transaction model to manage the quality of context‐aware applications. The authors have not seen similar work on this topic.
Details
Keywords
Jun Li, Yingyi Bu, Shaxun Chen, Xianping Tao and Jian Lu
Pervasive computing enhances the environment by embedding many computers that are gracefully integrated with human users. The purpose of this paper is to describe the creation of…
Abstract
Purpose
Pervasive computing enhances the environment by embedding many computers that are gracefully integrated with human users. The purpose of this paper is to describe the creation of a smart context‐aware environment in which computation follows people and serves them everywhere. Building such smart environments is still difficult and complex due to lacking a uniform infrastructure that can adapt to diverse smart domains.
Design/methodology/approach
To address this problem, the paper proposes an agent‐based pluggable infrastructure which integrates a mobile agent system named pvMogent, establishes an ontology‐based context model and introduces a workflow‐based application model with the open services gateway initiative (OSGi) framework. By plugging corresponding domain context in ontology model and different applications, the infrastructure can be customized to various domains.
Findings
Through the implementation of several context‐aware applications, it was found that the infrastructure can largely reduce the development complexity as well as keep the domain extensibility by plugging corresponding domain context in ontology model.
Originality/value
In this paper, a number of key techniques are explored which are suitable for building context‐awareness. The experiences and lessons learned from the system development could further facilitate and inspire the research in this direction.