A context management architecture for m-commerce applications

Abstract

Abstract Mobile commerce applications operate in highly dynamic environments with diverse characteristics and interesting challenges. The characteristics and conditions of these environments -called context-, can be exploited to provide adaptive mobile services, in terms of user interface, functionality and content, in order to offer more effective m-commerce. Today, building adaptive mobile services is a complex and time-consuming task due to the lack of standardized methods, tools and architectures for the identification, representation and management of the context. Addressing some of these issues, recent works have provided formal extensions for various stages of the m-commerce application lifecycle, such as extended UML class diagrams for building design models and have used context parameters in order to offer adaptive applications. Using these works as the basis, in this paper we propose a context management architecture, which accommodates the requirements that have been identified for m-commerce applications. The proposed architecture is evaluated in terms of completeness, complexity, performance and utility, and compared against other approaches proposed in the literature regarding its suitability for supporting context-aware m-commerce applications.