Context-Aware Systems Architecture (CaSA)

Context-aware systems are becoming increasingly mainstream as more and more technology allows real-time collection of daily life data and it is more and more affordable to provide useful services to citizens in various situations of need. However, developers in this field are not well supported. Naturally we have inherited a number of methods and tools from past software engineering efforts to create previous computing systems. However, the most recent generation of systems dominated by sensing supported context-awareness integrating a variety of data sources and with a higher expectation of personalized services delivered at the right time, place and in the right form, are not well supported. Developers need more guidance and support to pinpoint those valuable contexts and to work out ways of detecting them and activating the right services associated with these contexts. Our community has reported on various systems they created however not much is emerging in a way of a methodology, a standard, a transferable body of advice and guidance which can help teams next time they need to develop a new system. In this article we explain a couple of complementary methodologies which we have tried and tested through development of different context-aware projects. We argue these are of practical usefulness and provide an initial valid point of discussion for our community to create evolved versions of these which can be tested more widely to identify good practice in the area.