Capturing Context Requirements1

Context-aware applications require context information to adapt their behaviour to the current situation. When developing context-aware applications, application developers need to transform specific application context requirements into application logic to discover, select and bind to suitable sources of context information. To facilitate the development of context-aware applications, we propose a Context Binding Transparency that simplifies the process of retrieving context information. A major element of this transparency is the declarative approach to capturing context requirements. This enables application developers to specify their context requirements at a high level of abstraction rather than in programming code, and thus to separate the transformation of context requirements into context binding logic from the development of the actual application logic. In this way, we try to decrease the development effort and facilitate maintenance and evolution of context-aware applications. This paper discusses the design of this binding transparency; especially focusing on the language we developed to capture context requirements.