Abstract-Band - Fakultät für Informatik, TU Wien - Technische ...

Sanjin Sehic
COPAL: An Adaptive Approach to Context Provisioning
Studium: Masterstudium Software Engineering & Internet Computing
Betreuer: Univ.Prof. Dr. Schahram Dustdar
Context-awareness is one of the cornerstones of mobile and ubiquitous
computing. It refers to the idea that an application can understand its context
to reason about its current situation and perform suitable operations based
on this knowledge. Moreover, as the situation changes over time, the
application should adapt its behavior according to new circumstances, which
would increase its usability and effectiveness. This thesis introduces the
COPAL (COntext Provisioning for ALl) middleware an adaptive approach to
context provisioning. The COPAL middleware is a flexible and scalable
context-aware service platform that provides a new publish-process-listen
programming model. Its loosely-coupled and modular implementation allows
the system to be customized for different use-cases and deployed on
different platforms. The COPAL programming model separates the task of
context-awareness into three independent steps supported by three looselycoupled
components: publishers, processors, and listeners. This component
design enables developers to progressively extend the system to support new
types of context information and various context-aware applications.
Furthermore, the thesis presents a customizable processing mechanism that
dynamically couples context information with its processing. This mechanism
is the key concepts in the COPAL middleware by which a wide range of
operations can be carried out. Most importantly, it can be used to infer new
context information and to provide some context information at different
levels of granularity.
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