Dynamic context bindings - Infrastructural support for context-aware applications

The world is increasingly equipped with high-capacity, interconnected, mobile and embedded computing devices. Context-awareness provides an attractive approach to personalize applications such that they better suit the user’s needs in this rich computing environment. Context-aware applications use context information, offered by context sources, to adapt their behavior to the situation at hand. The exchange of context information requires an association between a context consuming context-aware application and suitable context producing context sources. We call these associations ‘context bindings’. Developing context-aware applications is complex due to some intrinsic characteristics of context sources. Firstly, context sources are distributed. Consequently, creating a context binding requires some form of discovery and selection of context sources. Secondly, context sources are arbitrary available during the life-span of the application. This makes a binding hard to maintain. Finally, context sources offer context information with a fluctuating quality. This makes a binding possibly unsuitable for the application. Currently, developers need to spend considerable effort to develop application code to create and maintain required context bindings, which can deal with these complexities. This thesis provides insights in the generic characteristics of contextaware applications and their development process. We propose an abstraction, called the Context Binding Transparency. This transparency has as goal to mask the complexities of creating and maintaining context bindings for the application developer. In this way, we facilitate the development process of context-aware applications. The responsibility for creating and maintaining context bindings is relieved from the application developer and is shifted to a context binding infrastructure. This enables application developers to focus on the development of primary application logic rather than the logic needed to create and maintain context bindings.