A web platform and a methodology to promote a collaborative development of context-aware systems

The development of services that use context data to personalize their behaviour is complex. Data coming from distributed and heterogeneous sources have to be acquired, processed and managed. One of the main tasks in the development process is the definition of user situations, which are best defined by people with expertise in the application domain that usually do not have technical skills. The existing context-aware development toolkits are for programmers, so nontechnical domain experts cannot participate in the development process. In order to solve this gap, this article presents a web-based platform to ease the development of context-aware services. The web front-end provides several dialogs in order to manage context data, involving the creation of the context model, the access to the defined context data sources and the definition of situations based on rules. A situation-driven methodology is also proposed in order to guide the development process based in the collaboration among programmers and domain experts. The paper describes the main functionalities of the platform, the development methodology and presents the results of the user evaluation tests that have been carried out.

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