Context and Adaptivity in Pervasive Computing Environments: Links with Software Engineering and Ontological Engineering

Abstract

In this article we present a review of selected literature of context-aware pervasive computing while integrating theory and practice from various disciplines in order to construct a theoretical grounding and a technical follow-up path for our future research. This paper is not meant to provide an extensive review of the literature, but rather to integrate and extend fundamental and promising theoretical and technical aspects found in the literature. Our purpose is to use the constructed theory and practice in order to enable anywhere and anytime adaptive e-learning environments. We particularly elaborate on context, adaptivity, context-aware systems, ontologies and software development issues. Furthermore, we represent our view point for context-aware pervasive application development particularly based on higher abstraction where ontologies and semantic web activities, also web itself, are of crucial.