Context-aware applications are applications that take into account a user's context (e.g. personal preferences, characteristics, agenda) and environment (e.g. people, places and things in the user's vicinity), in order to provide an improved user experience.

One of the core research topics of WISE is conceptual modeling. During conceptual modeling, we create models for the system to be developed or for the domain under considerration without consideration implementation aspects. While in the past, the conceptual modeling techniques, such as ORM, UML or ER where very general and could be used for different domains, nowadays domain-specific modeling languages are preferred. These domain-specific modeling languages are tailored to their domain and provide first-class modeling concepts for concepts that are specific for the domain under consideration.

In this research we concentrate on the development of mobile applications running on mobile devices such as smartphones.

This research concentrates on making Web-based systems adaptive, i.e. how can the content and services provided in a Web system adapt automatically and dynamically to the characteristics, needs and context of the user. The research includes techniques to provide adaptivity but also authoring support for specifying the required adaptivity. Adaptivity is investigated for web-based systems in general and more in particular for web-based e-learning systems, Virtual Reality based web sytems and games.

This research track focusses on methods for designing and developing web systems.