Conceptual data modeling for realizing context-aware services

Recently, context-aware applications, which provide customized services using personalized contextual information, have gained much attention. However, core IT technologies for realizing context-aware services are not sufficient to support the actual development of context-aware applications. Especially, it is very hard to find studies on context-aware data modeling that can provide different responses even for the same information according to users’ situation. In practice, most context-aware services are managing contextual information in the phase of application development in a rather ad-hoc way. Unfortunately, this approach has an obvious limitation of expansibility when the amount of rapidly increasing contextual information is considered. In this paper, we first define the concept of contextual dependency among data objects. Second, we provide a context-aware data modeling methodology for modeling contextual information into the Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD, for short) based on contextual dependency. Finally, we design a simple scenario for context-aware services, construct an ERD from the scenario based on the discovered design rules, and implement a prototype of the service.