Situation-Driven Development: A Methodology for the Development of Context-Aware Systems

Abstract

Several toolkits have been proposed in order to ease the development of context-aware systems, providing high-level programming interfaces to manage context data. One of the main tasks in the development of such systems is the definition of user situations that have to be identified by the system in order to adapt its behaviour. These situations are best defined by domain experts, but usually they do not have programming skills. Apart from that, there is a lack of methodologies to guide the development process. This paper presents a methodology based on the definition of situations that is designed to involve domain experts in the development process. This way, they can support programmers in the definition of the required situations. Also, a web-based platform has been implemented in order to manage context data without any programming skills. This way, domain experts can also configure the situations to be detected by the system.