Improving the Quality of Context-Aware Applications: An Activity-Oriented Context Approach

Context-awareness is one of the major research areas of pervasive computing. Context plays an important role in such systems. In most existing work, researchers view context as all elements in the environment of an application and use it just as passive data. This kind of context is unfavorable to the quality of context-aware applications. During the development of applications, it is difficult for developers to analyze, specify and organize everything in the environment accurately and completely. This kind of application is hard to be extended or modified when the requirements on environment change in the future. In the runtime, these applications have to deal with all the environment events even though they have nothing to do with the current user activity which should be served. In this paper, we propose an activity-oriented context (AOC) approach in order to improve the quality of context-aware applications. We give the AOC concept model and a context-aware software model with proactive activity-oriented context entity. We implement a platform to support context-awareness with activity-oriented context (PAOC). We also present a case study and an evaluation to demonstrate the usability and performance of our approach.