Foundations for a Platform to Develop Context-aware Systems by Domain Experts

There are several toolkits in order to develop context-aware systems. Most of them are for programmers, providing high-level APIs in order to manage context data. Therefore, people that do not have programming skills but have the necessary knowledge about the application domain where the system is going to be deployed cannot participate in the development process. One of the main tasks in the development of context-aware systems is the definition of user situations, which are best defined by people with expertise in the application domain. The involvement of domain experts can improve the final product and it can speed up the development process. This article presents the theoretical foundations for a toolkit in order to promote the involvement of domain experts in the development of context-aware systems. Based on these requirements, a platform to develop such systems has been implemented and it has been validated with domain experts of the tourism domain.