From user context states to context-aware applications

In many cases, in order to be effective, software applications need to allow sensitivity to user context state changes. This implies however additional complexity associated with the need for applications’ adaptability (being capable of capturing context, interpreting it and reacting on it). Hence, we envision 3 ‘musts’ that, in combination, are especially relevant to the design of context-aware applications: (i) At the business level, the different possible context states of the user must be properly identified and modeled; (ii) Both at the business and application level, the corresponding desirable behaviors must be identified and modeled, as well as the overall behavior which represents the required adaptability in terms of valid switches between desirable behaviors; (iii) The models at the business and application level must be aligned, i.e. the application models should represent proper solutions with respect to functionality and adaptability needs expressed at the business level. In this work, we address the mentioned challenges, by furthering the development of a business-application-alignment approach, extending it to cover context-awareness. We illustrate our achieved results by means of a small example. It is expected that this research contribution will be relevant and useful with respect to the challenge of aligning business modeling and software design.