Decision tree based context management in a collaborative environment

Distributed applications in a heterogeneous environment (heterogeoous wireless and mobile networks, heterogenous middlewares and operating systems, etc.) require facilities for context adaptation especially when mobile users are collaborating through this environment. In this work the context adaptation is considered as a set of rules on the following parameters: connectivity, user availability and user location. These rules anticipate the changes that may occur on the environment parameters in order to provide an adaptable service. A decision tree-based approach is used to help extracting generalized rules from a variety of contextual information. A collaborative mobile telediagnosis application illustrates the suggested approach and its implementation.