Empowering End-Users to Develop Context-Aware Mobile Applications Using a Web Platform

Context-aware mobile applications can adapt their information and functionalities according to the users' needs. The required personalization layer is usually implemented by programmers due to the complex processes that are involved. An important trend in software development is that more and more applications are being written not only by programmers but also by people with expertise in other domains. Since most of the existing context-aware development toolkits are designed for programmers, non-technical users cannot implement these kinds of applications. This article presents a web-based platform to ease the development of context-aware mobile applications by non-technical end-users. The architecture and implementation details of the system are presented and the evaluation of the platform by non-programmers is discussed.

[1]  Diego López-de-Ipiña,et al.  A Methodology and a Web Platform for the Collaborative Development of Context-Aware Systems , 2013, Sensors.

[2]  Alan F. Blackwell End-user developers at home , 2004, CACM.

[3]  Raouf Boutaba,et al.  Cloud computing: state-of-the-art and research challenges , 2010, Journal of Internet Services and Applications.

[4]  Daqing Zhang,et al.  Toward a cooperative programming framework for context-aware applications , 2011, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[5]  Siobhán Clarke,et al.  CASS - Middleware for Mobile Context-Aware Applications , 1990 .

[6]  J. B. Brooke,et al.  SUS: A 'Quick and Dirty' Usability Scale , 1996 .

[7]  Timothy Sohn,et al.  iCAP: Interactive Prototyping of Context-Aware Applications , 2006, Pervasive.

[8]  Jakob E. Bardram The Java Context Awareness Framework (JCAF) - A Service Infrastructure and Programming Framework for Context-Aware Applications , 2005, Pervasive.

[9]  Fabio Paternò,et al.  Cicero Designer: An Environment for End-User Development of Multi-Device Museum Guides , 2009, IS-EUD.

[10]  Tao Gu,et al.  A service-oriented middleware for building context-aware services , 2005, J. Netw. Comput. Appl..

[11]  Claudia Linnhoff-Popien,et al.  A Context Modeling Survey , 2004 .

[12]  Erik Wilde,et al.  From the Internet of Things to the Web of Things: Resource-oriented Architecture and Best Practices , 2011, Architecting the Internet of Things.

[13]  Matthias Baldauf,et al.  A survey on context-aware systems , 2007, Int. J. Ad Hoc Ubiquitous Comput..

[14]  Margaret Burnett,et al.  End-User Development , 2013, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[15]  Diego López-de-Ipiña,et al.  Context-Based Tourism Information Filtering with a Semantic Rule Engine , 2012, Sensors.

[16]  Boris E. R. de Ruyter,et al.  New research perspectives on Ambient Intelligence , 2009, J. Ambient Intell. Smart Environ..

[17]  Gregory D. Abowd,et al.  A Conceptual Framework and a Toolkit for Supporting the Rapid Prototyping of Context-Aware Applications , 2001, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[18]  Jin Song Dong,et al.  Semantic Space: an infrastructure for smart spaces , 2004, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[19]  Frank Vahid,et al.  A logic block enabling logic configuration by non-experts in sensor networks , 2005, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[20]  Jacek Gwizdka jgwizdka What ’ s in the Context ? , 2007 .

[21]  Harry Chen,et al.  Intelligent Agents Meet the Semantic Web in Smart Spaces , 2004, IEEE Internet Comput..