6th Workshop on Context Modeling
and Reasoning (CoMoRea'09)
http://www.nexus.uni-stuttgart.de/COMOREA
@7th Annual IEEE Intl. Conference on
Pervasive Computing and Communications,
Galveston, Texas, March 9-13, 2009


Workshop Scope
==============

There is a growing interest in context-aware applications
that intelligently support user tasks by acting
autonomously on behalf of users. Behavior of context-
aware applications depends not only on their internal
state and user interactions but also on the context
sensed during their execution. Some early models of
context information already exist, however many research
issues related to context information modeling are still
not fully addressed. Existing context models vary in
types of context information they can represent. While
some models take the user's current situation, e.g. "in a
meeting", into account others model the physical
environment, i.e. locations. A more generic approach to
context modeling is needed in order to capture various
features of context information including a variety of
types of context information, dependencies between
context information, quality of context information and
context histories.

In addition, to ease software engineering problems
encountered in programming context-aware applications,
appropriate abstractions are necessary to support
discovery and reuse of context information as well as
scalable methods of context processing and management.

This workshop's aim is to advance the state of the art in
context modeling and reasoning and also discuss
fundamental issues in context processing and management.
The goal is to identify concepts, theories and methods
applicable to context modeling and context reasoning as
well as system-oriented issues related to the design and
implementation of context-aware systems.

The Challenge
=============
CoMoRea will provide a forum for researchers to present
and discuss recent research results and ongoing work. To
further foster exchange of experiences and collaboration
among researchers, this year's workshop contains a
novelty: the challenge. It is a common scenario that we
ask researchers to apply their research on.

The scenario can be found in Marc Weisers pioneering
article, "The Computer for the 21st Century", online
available at
http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html.
It starts with "Sal awakens: she smells coffee." and ends
with "Sal is glad Mary did not make the biography
available only during the time of the meeting, as many
people do...".

When you apply your work to that scenario, you should
give a sense of how your context model or your context-
aware framework / middleware / toolkit can support this
scenario. This can involve listing the development tasks,
describing the software engineering lifecycle, if any,
and specifying any other modeling, configuration or
installation efforts required.

Note that we are not asking you to actually build a
system. Instead, we are essentially asking you to submit
a technical proposal stating why your model/system is a
good for supporting this scenario. If we like your
proposal, we may consider funding you to implement it.
This proposal can include information about the following
criteria (if applicable):

1. Knowledge Engineering Effort: amount of time it took
to specify the contexts and the rules
2. Flexibility: how easily can we change the conditions,
add a new context, and respond to a change scenario?
3. Usability of your modeling/framework from an
application developer perspective
4. Software Engineering Effort: how many different
components, how many LOC (lines of context description)?
5. Expressiveness: can I specify some fairly complex
conditions?
6. Does the system deals with uncertainty? Does the user
get feedback about context quality and resulting service
quality?
7. Does your system perform any kind of consistency
checking?

In addition, we encourage you to provide some sample
context model files (e.g., OWL files or Prolog rules or
in any other format). Also, for this scenario, we are
not concerned with the details of context-sensing. Please
assume that appropriate "low-level" contexts can be
sensed. What we are most interested in is how you would
use these "low-level" contexts in supporting the
scenario.

We also encourage you to be creative in interpreting this
scenario and really showcasing how your favorite
model/system can do wonders. At the same time, we would
like to make the process interactive (just as it would be
in a real software development project). Potential
authors are encouraged to get in touch with the
organizers with any questions on the scenario or on what
is expected from them.

We will determine the "winner" of the challenge under all
accepted papers during the workshop. We will ask each
group of authors to judge the other submissions based on
given evaluation criteria (including, but not limited to
the ones above). The winner is given a certificate and
will be honored on the CoMoRea webpage.

Important Note
==============
Submissions are not limited to work that is applied to
the scenario. However, quality papers that target the
scenario of the challenge will be favored.

In general, the following topics are of interest to this
workshop:
* Context modeling techniques
* Domain-specific context models
* Ontology-based approaches to context modeling and
reasoning
* Hybrid context models (integration of various modeling
techniques)
* Advanced issues in context modeling, including issues
of information quality and ambiguity
* Context reasoning algorithms, their complexity and
accuracy
* Discovery and reuse of context information
* Privacy of context information
* Distributed and scalable context management
* Experiences with using context models to build context-
aware applications
* Tool support for context modeling and development of
context model-based applications
* Balance of autonomy with user control

Submissions
===========
Submitted papers will be refereed by the workshop Program
Committee.
Accepted papers will appear in the PerCom'09 Workshops
proceedings published by IEEE Computer Society Press.

The papers should be in the IEEE format and should be no
more than 5 pages in length. Research papers must be an
original unpublished work and not under review elsewhere.
Experience reports must be stated as such and a
comprehensive discussion of the taken approach,
experiences, and its assessment is expected. While
submitting, the authors should clearly state whether they
target the challenge or not. Papers should be submitted
via the EasyChair CoMoRea page:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=comorea09

Important Dates
===============

Paper submissions: October 5, 2008
Notification: December 19, 2008
Camera ready version: January 7, 2009
Workshop: March 9 or 13, 2009

Workshop Committee
==================
Workshop co-chairs:
Jadwiga Indulska, The University of Queensland, Australia
Daniela Nicklas, Carl von Ossietzky Universit?t
Oldenburg, Germany
Anand Ranganathan, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA

Web chair:
Matthias Wieland, Universitet Stuttgart, Germany

Programme committee:
Jalal Al-Muhtadi, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia
John Bateman, Bremen Uni-versity, Germany
Martin Bauer, NEC Heidelberg, Germany
Oliver Brdiczka, Palo Alto Re-search Center, USA
Waltenegous Dargie, Technical University of Dres-den,
Germany
Karen Henricksen, Australia
Ghita Kouadri Mostefaoui, Oxford University Computing
Laboratory, UK
Daniele Riboni, University of Milan, Italy
Ricky Robinson, NICTA, Australia
Gregor Schiele, Universit?t Mannheim, Germany
Daqing Zhang, Institut National des T?l?communications,
France