Model-driven design of context-aware applications

In many cases, in order to be effective, software applications need to allow sensitivity to context changes. This implies however additional complexity associated with the need for applications’ adaptability (being capable of capturing context, interpreting it and reacting on it). Hence, we envision 3 ‘musts’ that, in combination, are especially relevant to the design of context-aware applications. Firstly, at the business modeling level, it is considered crucial that the different possible context states can be properly captured and modeled, states that correspond to certain desirable behaviors. Secondly, it must be known what are the dependencies between the two, namely between states and behaviors. And finally, what is valid for application design in general, business needs are to be aligned to application solutions. In this work, we address the mentioned challenges, by approaching the notion of context and extending from this perspective a previously proposed business-software alignment approach. We illustrate our achieved results by means of a small example. It is expected that this research contribution will be useful as an additional result concerning the alignment between business modeling and software design

EDOC: meeting the challenges of enterprise computing

An increasing demand for interoperable applications exists, sparking the real-time exchange of data across borders, applications, and IT platforms. To perform these tasks, enterprise computing now encompasses a new class of groundbreaking technologies such as Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA); business process integration and management; and middleware support, like that for utility, grid, peer-to-peer, and autonomic computing. Enterprise computing also influences the processes for business modeling, consulting, and service delivery; it affects the design, development, and deployment of software architecture, as well as the monitoring and management of such architecture. As enterprises demand increasing levels of networked information and services to carry out business processes, IT professionals need conferences like EDOC to discuss emerging technologies and issues in enterprise computing. For these reasons, what started out as the Enterprise Distributed Object Computing (EDOC) conference has come to encompass much more than just distributed objects. So this event now used the name International EDOC Enterprise Computing Conference, to recognize this broader scope yet also retain the initial conference's name recognition

On the standardisation of Web service management operations

Given the current interest in TCP/IP network management research towards Web services, it is important to recognise how standardisation can be achieved. This paper mainly focuses on the standardisation of operations and not management information. We state that standardisation should be done by standardising the abstract parts of a WSDL document, i.e. the interfaces and the messages. Operations can vary in granularity and parameter transparency, creating four extreme operation signatures, all of which have advantages and disadvantages

A Distributed Context-Aware Trust Management Architecture

The realization of a pervasive context-aware service platform imposes new challenges for the security and privacy aspects of the system in relation to traditional service platforms. One important aspect is related with the management of trust relationships, which is especially hard in a pervasive environment because users are supposed to interact with entities unknown before hand in an ad-hoc and dynamic manner. Current trust management solutions do not adapt nor scale well in this dynamic service provisioning scenario because they require previously defined trust relationships in order to operate. The objective of this thesis is to design, prototype and validate a context-aware distributed trust management architecture in order to address: (a) the lack of integration between available trust solutions and security and privacy management languages, and (b) the dynamic characteristics of a context-aware service platform

Trustworthiness and Quality of Context Information

Context-aware service platforms use context information to customize their services to the current users’ situation. Due to technical limitations in sensors and context reasoning algorithms, context information does not always represent accurately the reality, and Quality of Context (QoC) models have been proposed to quantify this inaccuracy. The problems we have identified with existing QoC models is that they do not follow a standard terminology and none of them clearly differentiate quality attributes related to instances of context information (e.g. accuracy and precision) from trustworthiness, which is a quality attribute related to the context information provider. In this paper we propose a QoC model and management architecture that supports the management of QoC trustworthiness and also contributes to the terminology alignment of existing QoC models.\ud In our QoC model, trustworthiness is a measurement of the reliability of a context information provider to provide context information about a specific entity according to a certain quality level. This trustworthiness value is used in our QoC management architecture to support context-aware service providers in the selection of trustworthy context\ud providers. As a proof of concept to demonstrate the feasibility of our work we show a prototype implementation of our QoC model and management architecture

Using P3P in a web services-based context-aware application platform

This paper describes a proposal for a privacy control architecture to be applied in the WASP project. The WASP project aims to develop a context-aware service platform on top of 3G networks, using web services technology. The proposed privacy control architecture is based on the P3P privacy policy description standard defined by W3C. The paper identifies extensions to P3P and its associated preference expression language APPEL that are needed to operate in a context-aware environment

On the role of domain ontologies in the design of domain-specific visual modeling langages

Domain-Specific Visual Modeling Languages should provide notations and abstractions that suitably support problem solving in well-defined application domains. From their user’s perspective, the language’s modeling primitives must be intuitive and expressive enough in capturing all intended aspects of domain conceptualizations. Over the years formal and explicit representations of domain conceptualizations have been developed as domain ontologies. In this paper, we show how the design of these languages can benefit from conceptual tools developed by the ontology engineering community

The role of the RM-ODP computational viewpoint concepts in the MDA approach

An MDA design approach should be able to accommodate designs at different levels of platform-independence. We have proposed a design approach previously (in [2]), which allows these levels to be identified. An important feature of this approach is the notion of abstract platform. An abstract platform is determined by the platform characteristics that are relevant for applications at a certain level of platform-independence, and must be established by considering various design goals. In this paper, we define a framework that makes it possible to use RM-ODP concepts in our MDA design approach. This framework allows a recursive application of the computational viewpoint at different levels of platform-independence. This is obtained by equating the RM-ODP notion of infrastructure to our notion of abstract platform