Towards semantic-based adaptation decisions for context-aware mobile computing

This paper studies the problem of adaptation decisions for context-aware mobile computing. In most context-aware systems to date, context-aware adaptation decisions are made by developers during the design-time or compile-time. Such approaches inevitably place an immense load on developers, especially in an extremely dynamic environment like mobile computing, to anticipate, formulate, and maintain adaptation rules. In this paper, we explore automated context-aware adaptation decisions at run-time to get around this problem. The resulting middleware system, CAMPUS, utilizes ontologies to capture the underlying semantics of involved entities, and perform DL and FOL reasoning on these ontologies to automatically derive adaptation decisions at run-time. The CAMPUS implementation has been evaluated with a number of case studies. The results are significant in that they show that CAMPUS can greatly reduce the efforts required to developed context-aware mobile application without significant degradation in its performance.