ODM-based modeling for user-centered context-aware mobile applications

Context-aware development has been an emergent subject of many researches in ubiquitous computing. Despite different approaches for context modeling, we notice that there is still no consensus and their context models are either incomplete or domain specific. This paper aims to synthesize these approaches and proposes a context model which should be general to be used by different user-centered mobile applications, specific to cover the main contextual entities proposed in the literature, flexible to allow an extension and to take into account new entities specific to a given application domain. To fulfill these requirements, we adopt an ODM (Ontology Definition Meta model) approach. The principal objective of the ODM is to bridge the gap between traditional software tools for modeling and artificial intelligence techniques for making ontologies. Using such an approach is possible to create a high level modeling and benefit from all the advantages of both spaces.