Shubhabrata Sen

A context management framework for context‐aware applications in mobile spaces

Purpose – The rapid proliferation of mobile context aware applications has resulted in an increased research interest towards developing specialized context data management strategies for mobile entities. The purpose of this paper is to aim to develop a new way to model mobile entities and manage their contexts accordingly.Design/methodology/approach – This paper proposes the concept of “Mobile Space” to model mobile entities and presents strategies to manage the various contexts associated therein. To handle availability related issues, two system services are designed: the “Availability Updating Service” which is an identifier based mechanism and is designed to keep track of mobile objects and handle availability related issues, and the “Application Callback Service” which is a publish/subscribe based mechanism to handle application disruptions and interruptions arising due to mobility.Findings – The paper presents a detailed study of the proposed framework and a description of the underlying services a...

Managing context data for diverse operating spaces

Context-aware computing is an exciting paradigm in which applications perceive and react to changing environments in an unattended manner. To enable behavioral adaptation, a context-aware application must dynamically acquire context data from different operating spaces in the real world, such as homes, shops and persons. Motivated by the sheer number and diversity of operating spaces, we propose a scalable context data management system in this paper to facilitate data acquisition from these spaces. In our system, we design a gateway framework for all operating spaces and develop matching algorithms to integrate the local context schemas of operating spaces into a global set of domain schemas upon which SQL-based context queries can be issued from applications. The system organizes the operating space gateways as peers in semantic overlay networks and employs distributed query processing techniques over these overlays. Evaluation results on a prototype implementation demonstrate the effectiveness of our system design.

Context gateway for physical spaces

Context-aware computing applications dynamically change their behaviors based on the context data and services provided by multiple physical spaces in the real world, such as persons, shops, homes and offices. In this paper, we propose a generic context gateway framework to manage these heterogeneous physical spaces of context sources. The framework forms a key enabling component of a scalable context-aware middleware that enables the effective access of context data and services from physical spaces. We have designed and implemented a number of gateway functions in our framework to facilitate the context data acquisition, processing and communication. These include diversified services with plug-in management, a query processing engine plus context reasoning capability, as well as the global and local connection between multiple gateways. The functionality and technical feasibility of the gateway have been demonstrated in our system prototype.

A Mean-Variance Based Index for Dynamic Context Data Lookup

primary functionality of context aware applications is the retrieval of different types of context data from various context sources and adapting their behavior accordingly. In order to facilitate context aware application development, a context aware middleware must provide an effective context data management and lookup strategy. The use of a traditional index for indexing dynamic context data is not feasible due to the high update overhead. In this paper, we propose a context data indexing mechanism that utilizes the statistical properties of data viz. the mean and variance to cluster similar data values together and minimizes the need for frequent index updates. Experimental results indicate that the performance of the proposed index structure is satisfactory with respect to the query response time and query accuracy together with a low maintenance overhead.

Context Data Management for Mobile Spaces

Context-aware applications can monitor and detect the surrounding Context-aware applications can monitor and detect the surrounding situation changes of context entities, and adapt to these situations automatically. As context-aware applications can reside in mobile entities such as cars and mobile phone, an efficient context data management mechanism is required for mobile context-aware applications. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism to model and represent mobile entities. In addition, we also propose new system services to support mobile applications so that disruptions caused by mobility can be minimized.