Requirements elicitation for the design of context-aware applications in a UbiquftDus environment

With the invention of new interaction devices and the requirements for ubiquitous access to application systems, user's interactions have moved beyond the desktop and evolved into a trend of ongoing development. The context in which the application is being used becomes an integral part of the activity carried out with the system. The inclusion of context-awareness provides convenience and efficiency to users for their ubiquitous access. Traditional human-computer interface (HCI) theories are now inadequate for developing these context-aware applications, as we believe that the notion of context should be extended to different categories: computing contexts, user contexts, and physical contexts for ubiquitous computing. This demands a new paradigm for system requirements elicitation and design in order to make good use of such extended context information. In this paper, we introduce a methodology for the elicitation of context-aware requirements and the matching of context-awareness features to the target context by capability matching. Based on this model, we analyze the design issues of some common ubiquitous access situations and show how to fit them systematically into a context-aware application by considering the requirements of a ubiquitous tourist application.