AMBIT: Towards an Architecture for the Development of Context-dependent Applications and Systems

Abstract

The development of ubiquitous services tailored to the needs and expectations of a very large number of potential users (especially mobile users) requires that future applications and systems be aware of the service fruition contexts and possibly of accurate user profiles. The AMBIT research project aims at providing a general model of context as well as a platform that can be exploited to build and deploy different kinds of context-dependent applications and systems. We aim at overcoming the restrictions of the existing approaches, which are mainly due to the limited notion of context they propose (if any). In particular, we stress the fact that current technologies do not accurately consider the notion of context semantics and user profile, which is the main source of the flooding of useless data that overload systems and often users' minds.

Towards User-Aware Service Composition

“…The limitation of the existing approaches is that they are not global, being bounded to specific application fields or specific aspects of the context. So, in the frame of the AMBIT (Algorithms and Models for Building context-dependent Information delivery Tools) project 3 we have defined a model of user profile that aims at being more global than existing ones [8,13]; this model is composed of the following components: Environment parameters, which is a set of external conditions surrounding the user while performing activities (e.g., using an application); Personal parameters, which contain the essential data about the user's profile (e.g. name, gender, age, nationality), which are usually set by the user during the configuration of the application or the service; History parameters, which record past actions of the users, in order to have a more complete picture of the user itself.…”

AMBIT: Semantic Engine Foundations for Knowledge Management in Context-dependent Applications

“…This is far from simple; the main limitations of existing efforts lie in the limited notion of context they adopt, and especially in the almost complete absence of any attempt to model the semantics of the context. This is the challenging scenario of the recently started AM-BIT (Algorithms and Models for Building context-dependent Information delivery Tools) project 1 [5] a regional project cofunded by Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena and managed by the Softech-ICT research center. The main goal of the project is to study and implement a prototype software architecture for the development of context-dependent applications and systems, i.e., tools that provide users with services that are fully customized according to the context in which they operate.…”