Context-Aware Applications

Context-Aware Applications reacts based on information gathered from their environment. They operated base on high-stimulus based on which to react based on rules. The term context-awareness was introduced by Schilit et al. in "Context-Aware Computing Applications" (in 1994 IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications). Dey, in "Understanding and Using Context" (in Personal Ubiquitous Computing), defined context as «any information that can be used to characterise the situation of entities."

Context-aware applications adapt their behavior based on adapation policies and according to information about their environment and their execution. The gathering of such information, "Monitoring", is made from sources such as user inputs and sensors. Building large scale context-aware application is challenging because of two difficulties: first, the number of data sources makes it hard to maintain a proper organisation, second, because the gigantic number of data produced makes it hard to extract meaningfull information.

WildCAT is a generic framework for context-aware applications. It helps coping with these issues by providing user with easy access to sensors through a hierarchical organization, and by providing user a power SQL-like language to express conditions upon which to trigger adaptation code.

The Selfware project

Today's computing environments are becoming increasingly sophisticated. They involve numerous complex software that cooperate in potentially large scale distributed environments. These software are developed with very heterogeneous programming models and their configuration facilities are generally proprietary. Therefore, the management of these software (installation, configuration, tuning, repair ...) is a much complex task which consumes a lot of resources.
To get some additional informations about the Selfware project, see its homepage at: http://selfware.org.

WildCAT

WildCAT is a generic framework for context-aware applications. It permits the monitoring of large scale applications by allowing developers to easily organize andd access sensors through a hierarchical organization backed with a powerful SQL-like language to inspect sensors data and to trigger actions upon particular conditions.