Building context-awareness models for mobile applications

The design process followed to produce traditional applications needs to be enhanced to cope with new context-aware ubiquitous application requirements. With the popularity of ubiquitous computing, context-aware applications become clearly necessary. This new kind of applications allows mobile users to universally access services in respect to any context including his computing environment. Challenges for the design of such applications are to easily define context collection requirements, context analysis and adaptations of the applications due to changes in its environment. To face these issues, we propose, in this article, a generic and extensible way to model context-awareness of any application using the model-driven engineering (MDE) approach. For this purpose, we add a context-awareness aspect to application model views. We illustrate our solution by modeling a context-aware e-commerce application. The addition of a context-awareness aspect, should ease the definition of mobile applications. Furthermore, context-awareness models open the way to automate context-awareness code production.