On foundation of engineering context-sensitive applications

The communication environment surrounding our daily experience is more and more characterized by mobile devices that can exchange multimedia information and provide access to various services of complex nature. The trend is now clear that future consumer computing experience will be based on multiple pervasive communication devices and services, where navigability, context-sensitivity, adaptability and ubiquity are key characteristics. Several issues have been studied, models and methodologies proposed, and tools and systems implemented. However, when we look at the foundation and what we are missing in research, some of the most relevant issues probably are a formal model of context-sensitive and a notion of synthesizing reliable complex systems from vast numbers of unreliable components. In this paper, we discuss a formal foundation and software engineering techniques for mobile context-aware and context-dependent service derivation and application development, emphasizing the relationships between context and system.