A Comparison of Context-Modeling Representations for Context-Aware Applications

Ubiquitous computing seems to be an important trend to consider in the development of the next-generation software. This software will be typically distributed and embedded in a variety of devices involving a wide range of intelligence and computing power. In this trend, adequately modeling context as a mean of developing smarter applications and simplifying their interaction with users becomes a central issue in software engineering. In this paper we first outline our own comparison framework based on the level of abstraction that models allow when representing context. Later we review different approaches to model context as they have been proposed by authors in the recent years and summarize their contributions and potential weakness. Finally we classify the reviewed approaches according to the suggested comparison framework.