Context-as-a-Service: A Service Model for Cloud-Based Systems

Personalization and the use of context is becoming ubiquitous and is being applied across a broad and diverse range of domains and systems. For example, typical domains where research has addressed the application of context and context-awareness are e-learning and e-health monitoring. Concomitant with the growing interest is context is the increasing use of Cloud-based solutions and related service models such as Software-as-a-Service. The growing use of Cloud-based solutions with the increasing interest in personalization and context is discussed and we consider Cloud-based systems and service models and propose a new service model: Context-as-a-Service. We provide an overview of the proposed Context-as-a-Service service model with an illustrative scenario based on the domain of e-health monitoring. We conclude that currently the design and implementation of context and context-aware systems is restricted to experts in the field and postulate that there is a clear requirement for a platform upon which non-expert users may utilize context-awareness in real-world applications.