FRASCS: A Framework Supporting Context Sharing

Context-aware applications are those able to adapt their operations to the current context, without explicit user intervention. Since more and more applications collaborate to adapt their behavior to the same context, providing users with more appropriate service, it is necessary to take context sharing into account. In this paper, a framework named FRASCS is presented to dispose this problem. This framework provides a unified platform to collect, aggregate, analyze and store contextual information. With the aid of explicit context modeling and unified context management, it enables the context sharing between different applications. In addition, FRASCS supports bi-direction context transmission, permitting context to be pushed or pulled between applications and FRASCS to increase the flexibility of context accessibility. Finally, a case study is implemented to illustrate how our framework supports context sharing.