SCOUT: A Framework for Personalized Context-Aware Mobile Applications

The recent evolution in mobile devices, combined with rapid advancements in identification techniques, has lead to new opportunities for mobile application developers: mobile applications that can be made aware of their environment and the objects in it. Furthermore, by combining mobile devices and identification technology with the Web, mobile applications can be developed that exploit interesting services and information associated with nearby objects. We present an application framework that supports the development of such mobile applications, enabling them to become fully context-aware and capable of providing personalized information and services. Because of the decentralized nature of our approach, we allow for more flexibility and scalability, and significantly lower the threshold for third parties to benefit from our approach. Also, due to the separation of concerns and the systematic use of abstraction mechanisms, the framework supports a variety of implementation options (i.e. different identification techniques, push- or pull-based notification mechanisms, etc), while still hiding technical details from the application developer.
Publication Reference
Van Woensel, W., Casteleyn, S., De Troyer, O.: SCOUT: A Framework for Personalized Context-Aware Mobile Applications. In: Rossi, G. (ed.) Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web Engineering (Doctoral Consortium). CEUR-WS, San Sebastian, Spain (2009).

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