A Generic Approach for On-The-Fly Adding of Context-aware Features to Existing Websites

More and more, mobile devices act as personal information managers and are able to obtain rich contextual information on the user’s environment. Mobile, context-aware web applications can exploit this information to better address the needs of mobile users. Currently, such websites are either developed separately from their associated desktop-oriented version, or both versions are created simultaneously by employing methodologies that support multi-platform context-aware websites, requiring an extensive engineering effort. While these approaches provide a solution for developing new websites, they go past the plethora of existing websites. To address this issue, we present an approach for enhancing existing websites on-the-fly with context-aware features. We first discuss the requirements for such an adaptation process, and identify applicable adaptation methods to realize context-aware features. Next, we explain our generic approach, which is grounded in the use of semantic information extracted from existing websites. Finally, we present a concrete application of our approach that is based on the SCOUT framework for mobile and context-aware application development.
Publication Reference
Van Woensel, W., Casteleyn, S., De Troyer, O.: A Generic Approach for On-The-Fly Adding of Context-Aware Features to Existing Websites. In: De Bra, P. and Grønbaek, K. (eds.) Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia. pp. 143–152. ACM, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2011).

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