Towards business model and technical platform for the service oriented context-aware mobile virtual communities

The focus of existing virtual communities is centered on a particular product or social interaction and the role of mobile devices is restricted to exchange a limited amount of contents. Herewith we envisage that the upcoming virtual communities will exploit the potential of social interaction and context information to offer personalized services to its members and mobile devices will play a significant role in this process. As a step towards this direction, in this paper we propose a business model for the mobile virtual communities in which the mobile device takes on the role of a content producer and content consumer. Though there are a number of research issues which need to be addressed to realize such virtual communities, in this paper we focus on the service requirements, architecture and open source software implementation of a technical platform for the content producer and consumer mobile devices

Investigation of a hierarchical context-aware architecture for rule-based customisation of mobile computing service

The continuous technical progress in mobile device built-in modules and embedded sensing techniques creates opportunities for context-aware mobile applications. The context-aware computing paradigm exploits the relevant context as implicit input to characterise the user and physical environment and provide a computing service customised to the contextual situation. However, heterogeneity in techniques, complexity of contextual situation, and gap between raw sensor data and usable context keep the techniques from truly integration for extensive use. Studies in this area mainly focus on feasibility demonstration of the emerging techniques, and they lack general architecture support and appropriate service customisation strategy. This investigation aims to provide general system architecture and technical approaches to deal with the heterogeneity problem and efficiently utilise the dynamic context towards proactive computing service that is customised to the contextual situation. The main efforts of this investigation are the approaches to gathering, handling, and utilising the dynamic context information in an efficient way and the decision making and optimisation methods for computing service customisation. In brief, the highlights of this thesis cover the following aspects: (1) a hierarchical context-aware computing architecture supporting interoperable distribution and further use of context; (2) an in-depth analysis and classification of context and the corresponding context acquisition methods; (3) context modelling and context data representation for efficient and interoperable use of context; (4) a rule-based service customisation strategy with a rule generation mechanism to supervise the service customisation. In addition, feasibility demonstration of the proposed system and contribution justification of this investigation are conducted through case studies and prototype implementations. One case study uses mobile built-in sensing techniques to improve the usability and efficiency of mobile applications constrained by resource limitation, and the other employs the mobile terminal and embedded sensing techniques to predict users’ expectations for home facility automatic control. Results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed context handling architecture and service customisation methods. It shows great potential for employing the context of the computing environment for context-aware adaptation in pervasive and mobile applications but also indicates some underlying problems for further study

Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) for Future Internet Position Paper: System Functions, Capabilities and Requirements

Future Internet (FI) research and development threads have recently been gaining momentum all over the world and as such the international race to create a new generation Internet is in full swing: GENI, Asia Future Internet, Future Internet Forum Korea, European Union Future Internet Assembly (FIA). This is a position paper identifying the research orientation with a time horizon of 10 years, together with the key challenges for the capabilities in the Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) part of the Future Internet (FI) allowing for parallel and federated Internet(s)

AmbieSense: a system and reference architecture for personalised and context-sensitive information services for mobile users

The purpose of AmbieSense is to provide personalised, context-sensitive information to the mobile user. It is about augmenting digital information to physical objects, rooms, and areas. The aim is to provide relevant information to the right user and situation. Digital content is distributed from the surroundings and onto your mobile phone. An ambient information environment is provided by a combination of context tag technology, a software platform to manage and deliver the information, and personal computing devices to which the information is served. This paper describes how the AmbieSense reference architecture has been defined and used in order to deliver information to the mobile citizen at the right time, place and situation. Information is provided via specialist content providers. The application area addresses the information needs of travellers and tourists

Towards Activity Context using Software Sensors

Service-Oriented Computing delivers the promise of configuring and reconfiguring software systems to address user's needs in a dynamic way. Context-aware computing promises to capture the user's needs and hence the requirements they have on systems. The marriage of both can deliver ad-hoc software solutions relevant to the user in the most current fashion. However, here it is a key to gather information on the users' activity (that is what they are doing). Traditionally any context sensing was conducted with hardware sensors. However, software can also play the same role and in some situations will be more useful to sense the activity of the user. Furthermore they can make use of the fact that Service-oriented systems exchange information through standard protocols. In this paper we discuss our proposed approach to sense the activity of the user making use of software

Towards a user-centric and multidisciplinary framework for designing context-aware applications

Research into context-aware computing has not sufficiently addressed human and social aspects of design. Existing design frameworks are predominantly software orientated, make little use of cross-disciplinary work, and do not provide an easily transferable structure for cross-application of design principles. To address these problems, this paper proposes a multidisciplinary and user-centred design framework, and two models of context, which derive from conceptualisations within Psychology, Linguistics, and Computer Science. In a study, our framework was found to significantly improve the performance of postgraduate students at identifying the context of the user and application, and the usability issues that arise

City Data Fusion: Sensor Data Fusion in the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) has gained substantial attention recently and play a significant role in smart city application deployments. A number of such smart city applications depend on sensor fusion capabilities in the cloud from diverse data sources. We introduce the concept of IoT and present in detail ten different parameters that govern our sensor data fusion evaluation framework. We then evaluate the current state-of-the art in sensor data fusion against our sensor data fusion framework. Our main goal is to examine and survey different sensor data fusion research efforts based on our evaluation framework. The major open research issues related to sensor data fusion are also presented.Comment: Accepted to be published in International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies (IJDST), 201

Context-aware adaptation in DySCAS

DySCAS is a dynamically self-configuring middleware for automotive control systems. The addition of autonomic, context-aware dynamic configuration to automotive control systems brings a potential for a wide range of benefits in terms of robustness, flexibility, upgrading etc. However, the automotive systems represent a particularly challenging domain for the deployment of autonomics concepts, having a combination of real-time performance constraints, severe resource limitations, safety-critical aspects and cost pressures. For these reasons current systems are statically configured. This paper describes the dynamic run-time configuration aspects of DySCAS and focuses on the extent to which context-aware adaptation has been achieved in DySCAS, and the ways in which the various design and implementation challenges are met