Using Web technologies in assessment of context-aware pervasive/ubiquitous systems: A tourist guide service

An important aspect in the design of pervasive/ubiquitous applications is to evaluate them before their deployment in real scenarios. A possible strategy to assess them is to perform simulations that provide useful insights and results to the application designer. However, the simulation of pervasive/ubiquitous applications and environments has proven to be a considerable challenge for several reasons. For instance, many of the technologies (e.g., hardware and software) required to assess them either do not yet exist or are not momentarily available or accessible in terms of cost and readiness, not to mention other important requirements such as monitoring, communication management and profile/context state tracking of entities in the system. In order to make this process simpler and feasible, we defined a Web assessment tool that provides a simulation approach for ubiquitous environments by using Web technologies such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, Web application frameworks and a mapping/location Web service. Using these technologies, we implemented a pervasive service: a tourist guide service. With this tool, we were able to evaluate the proposed service quantitatively by studying the interactions between the users/entities involved, monitor their profile/context states, and track their movements across a predefined map area.