A Software Development Methodology and a Software Architecture for Context-Aware M-Commerce Applications

Mobile commerce is gaining importance in the recent years, as an enhanced version of e-commerce for the moving user. The mobile services through which m-commerce takes place operate in highly dynamic environments with diverse characteristics and under varying conditions. The characteristics and conditions of these environments –called context– can be exploited in order to offer a suitable user experience and deliver innovative and enhanced mobile services that will facilitate user interaction, attract new customers and maintain existing ones. Therefore, mobile commerce applications adhering to “anytime and anywhere” paradigm are required to be flexible. They should be able to adapt their user-perceived constituent parts, i.e. their interface, services and content towards a certain context. Several proposals for definition of context have been already proposed originating from various areas related to mobile commerce. However, an integrated, formal and methodological approach for the determination and representation of context, adjusted to special characteristics of mobile commerce applications, has not been insofar presented. This is one challenge we address in this thesis, through a conceptual model that includes: i) a clear and formal definition of context, ii) the depiction of its specific characteristics as metadata, iii) a methodology for its determination and iv) the presentation of an extension of UML class and case diagrams for its representation, all of them tailored to the special nature of mobile commerce applications.

Once the context information for an m-commerce application has been determined, the next step in order to achieve the goal of adaptivity is to capture the context information from its sources, process and distribute it to the software components that will use it. In order to offer a complete suite of tools for context management, we propose a software architecture for context information management suitable for m-commerce applications. We describe the functionality and characteristics of its components, as well as the interaction among these different components.

The usage of context information in order to achieve the ultimate goal of adaptivity should be done from a subsystem designed in such way that will simplify and homogenize the relevant processes and at the same time promote the independence of the code of the main application from the adaptation code. Addressing this issue, in this thesis we propose an approach for developing adaptive mobile commerce applications, adhering to the separation of concerns principle, which is offered by the aspect-oriented paradigm. By clearly separating the work required for the development of the application logic from that required for enabling application’s adaptive behavior, this approach reduces the development effort and at the same time promotes the flexibility, manageability and maintainability of adaptive m-commerce applications.