Journal of Computer Science and Technology ›› 2018, Vol. 33 ›› Issue (5): 900-917.doi: 10.1007/s11390-018-1865-9

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AocML: A Domain-Specific Language for Model-Driven Development of Activity-Oriented Context-Aware Applications

Xuan-Song Li1,2, Member, CCF, Xian-Ping Tao2, Senior Member, CCF, Member, IEEE, Wei Song1,2, Senior Member, CCF, Member, IEEE, Kai Dong3   

  1. 1 School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China;
    2 State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China;
    3 School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China
  • Received:2018-03-05 Revised:2018-07-18 Online:2018-09-17 Published:2018-09-17
  • Supported by:
    The work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant No. 2017YFB1001801, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61702263, 61761136003, and 61373011, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China under Grant No. BK20171427, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China under Grant No. 30917011322.

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Activity-oriented context-aware (AOCA) applications are representative in pervasive computing. These applications recognize daily-life human activities, perceive the environment status related to the activities, and react to ensure the smooth performance of the activities. Existing research proposed a specific light-weight, incremental method to support the development of such applications; however it is not easy to learn and use. This paper aims to facilitate the development of such applications and improve the productivity of developers. We propose AocML, a textual domain-specific language which provides a high-level abstraction of AOCA applications. Specifically, we first show the software model of AOCA applications and the abstract syntax of AocML. Then, we introduce the concrete syntax of AocML. We also implement the tools for AocML, including the development environment as well as the generation of Java code and ontology specification. Moreover, we use a case study and evaluation to demonstrate the advantages of AocML.

Key words: pervasive computing; context-awareness; model-driven development; domain-specific language;

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