Managing Dynamic Context to Optimize Smart Interactions and Services

Abstract

Abstract. With the rapid growth of socio-technical ecosystems, smart interactions and services are permeating every walk of life. As smart interactions must managed automatically and interactively in response to evolving user's matters of concern, the smart Internet requires creative approaches where services and interactions are implemented with awareness of, and dynamic adaptation to, users, computational environments, changing policies and unknown requirements. Consequently, modeling and managing dynamic context is critical for implementing smart services and smart interactions effectively. Thus, smart interactions need infrastructure to acquire, compose, and distribute context information to multiple execution endpoints. Moreover, context management must be controlled and governed to optimize system properties. This chapter surveys context modeling and management approaches intended for the optimization of smart interactions and services, discusses the main challenges and requirements of context-awareness in the smart Internet, and provides a feature-based framework useful for the evaluation and implementation of context modeling and management mechanisms.

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

“…In particular, a few works are directed towards context modeling, representation, and effective handling, aspects of particular interest to AMBIT. For instance, [3] proposes to design a context management system which is not application-dependent, [7] proposes an architectural framework for context data management, while [15] reports the result of a study on various context modeling and management approaches. However, most of the approaches in the literature primarily focus on specific aspects such as external user information, and/or do not consider the semantics of the context.…”

Towards Practical Runtime Verification and Validation of Self-Adaptive Software Systems

“…An entity is any subject that can affect the behaviour of the system and/or its interaction with the user. Context information must be modeled in such a way that it can be pre-processed after its acquisition from the environment, classified according to the corresponding domain, handled to be provisioned based on the system's requirements, and maintained to support its dynamic evolution [42]. Based on this definition, and from the perspective of runtime V&V, runtime monitoring must support context representation and monitoring to characterize the system's state with respect to its viability zone, taking into account the dynamic nature of viability zones.…”

“…Hence, an important challenge refers to context representation such that these specifications can adapt dynamically, according to changes in V&V concerns. With respect to context management, several challenges arise from the perspective of the context information lifecycle, that is context acquisition, handling, provisioning, maintenance, and disposal [42]. One of these challenges is the instrumentation of monitoring infrastructures with dynamic capabilities to deploy new monitoring strategies at runtime according to changes in V&V concerns (e.g., to deploy new sensors or reasoning strategies based on changes in adaptation goals and properties dynamically [43,11,25]).…”

Self-Healing Distributed Scheduling Platform

“…The context information must be modelled so that it can be discovered, pre-processed after its acquisition from the environment, and handled to be provisioned based on the system's requirements [2]. Instances of context entities relevant for RMS are services, processing nodes and SLAs.…”

“…Thus, socio-technical ecosystems require effective mechanisms to manage the provisioning of resources while releasing the user from having to manually orchestrate providers to achieve system objectives. Regardless whether infrastructure providers are called Grid-based Virtual Organizations or now Cloud providers, their objective is to offer reliable, secure and efficient computational resources ensuring that the underlying systems are fault tolerant by exposing selfhealing capabilities under dynamic environmental conditions [2]. Moreover, providers need to maintain their autonomy by keeping their own scheduling, security and negotiation policies.…”