Automatic context data life cycle management framework

Context data management is a challenging task in context aware application development. Highly dynamic data coming from distributed providers has to be acquired, processed, managed and stored in order to provide applications with real time up to date context data. A lot of work has been done in the area of Contextual Computing, proposing several architectures and frameworks. However, none of them offers automations to manage context data life cycle, having to manage it programmatically. This paper presents ezContext, a framework that provides an automatic context data life cycle management that reduces boilerplate lines of code and facilitates application development. The framework also has functionalities to perform all the tasks involved in the development stage of such systems, offering an application programming interface, visual debugging tools and mobility support. In order to validate the framework a contextual service use case has been successfully implemented and discussed.