Service Oriented Reference Architecture for the Development of Context-awareLearning Environments

Abstract

This Research-to-Practice Full Paper is concerned with the development of u-learning environments, which is a very complicated task due to, among other factors, the complexity in managing large amounts of context information and adapting content to different users and contexts. Possible solutions to overcome the challenges and provide support for the development of context-aware systems is the use of reference architectures (RA) and service-oriented architectures (SOA). RA is a software architecture that can be applied to build architectures of specific domain systems, supporting the development of system families. SOA is an architectural style that provides functionalities encapsulated in Web services, which make it easier the integration of dynamic adaptive behavior into the applications. Therefore, this paper presents oriented RA to assist the development of context-aware ubiquitous learning environments, characterized by their ability to obtain and use information from the users’ context. This enables the software to adapt the behavior, services or didactic resources, in accordance with the context where learning is taking place (e.g., location, time, student preference, etc.). The presented RA, named MOA, can be instantiated to develop specific context-aware learning environments. MOA was built based on ProSA-RA, which is a RA development process, and evaluated using the checklist technique. Also, a prototype was built to illustrate MOA instantiation. The evaluation served to demonstrate the validity of MOA, both at a practical level (applicability) and in meeting the quality requirements stipulated for RA.